


Take Me Back

by Safiyabat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Hurt Sam Winchester, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Past Abuse, Past Torture, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-02
Updated: 2015-07-02
Packaged: 2018-04-06 23:42:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 10
Words: 50,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4241112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Safiyabat/pseuds/Safiyabat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On Nov. 2, 1983, Mary Winchester died defending her infant son Sam during a riot.  Her grief-stricken husband, Dr. John Winchester, took the family on the road, vowing that no one would ever die in an underserved area because of lack of medical care again.  He raised his sons to be field doctors as well, but when Sam didn't toe the line he was disowned.</p><p>31 years later, Dean is Boston's top trauma surgeon.  An FBI agent is fished out of Boston Harbor with a bullet in his shoulder.  When the blood and harbor grunge are cleared away, Dean recognizes his patient: the prodigal son, Sam.  This is the story of how two brothers cope with the relationship they had, and figure out what kind of relationship they want now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. You're Overjoyed and Over-Fed

**Author's Note:**

> *warning: this fic discusses the long-term effects of an incestuous relationship that starts out with dubious consent.* This fic is NSFB.
> 
> Special thanks to my artist, Cassiopeia7, who was incredibly easy to work with, and to my beta, Elwarre, who was and is fantastic as always.

Dean picked up his office phone. He recognized the number easily. “Hey, Ben! How you doing, sport?” he greeted warmly. “Getting ready for bed?”

“Yeah, Dad. Since Mom and Matt have such an early bedtime at their house,” he sighed. “It’s not fair! When I stay with you I get to stay up as late as I want.”

“Now, that’s not entirely true, is it?” he challenged back. “You’re in bed by ten, eleven at the latest. Unless the Sox game goes into overtime. And why do you think that is?”

“Because you’re awesome and you love me more than they do?” God, the tone in his voice might have stretched back twenty-four years, so spot-on was it for Sammy at eight. But it wasn’t good to think like that, it wasn’t right to think like that. Couldn’t think about Sammy at all, not anymore. Not in thirteen years anyway. And sure, no other man would love his son as much as Dean did. “Matt doesn’t even come close to loving you as much as I do, kiddo,” he promised, “but he does love you very much and he is right about giving you an early bedtime. A growing boy needs sleep if he’s going to get nice and big and strong and smart. Now, you’re with them during the week, when you have to get up early for school. That means that you need to go to bed early to make sure you stay healthy. If you were living with me during the week you’d have the same problem, buddy.”

“But Parker’s parents let him stay up as late as he wants! He doesn’t have a bedtime!” Ben wailed. “It’s not fair!”

Dean snorted. He’d met Parker’s parents, and was reminded of an old saying of his father’s: “Money can’t buy brains.” “Yeah, well, how many times has Parker gotten sent down to the principal’s office so far this year?”

Ben thought about it. “Five.”

“And how long has the semester been going?”

“Uuh, five weeks.” 

“So, how do you think that whole ‘no bedtimes’ thing is working for him?”

Ben sulked for a moment. “Dad, I miss you.”

“I miss you too, kiddo. But you know what? We’re going to be together this weekend and we’re going to go pick some apples, we’re going to bake some apple pie, buy some cider donuts, it’s going to be awesome.” He smiled just thinking about it. Maybe someday Ben would get to be too old for apple picking, but he wasn’t there yet. 

“Can we go to the place with the goats again?” his son demanded, all of his hurt and angst about bedtime forgotten. “I really like the one with the goats.” 

“You bet, buddy. They make the best cider donuts anyway.” He chuckled.

“Do you ever stop thinking about food, Daddy?”

“Not if I can help it, little buddy. Why don’t you tell me what you did at school today?” He sat back while Ben filled him in on his day, describing the eternal war between the third-grade girls and the third grade boys and how Sadie wouldn’t let him use the computer until Miss Rawlins told her to. 

Dean sat back and took it all in. This was all more than he’d ever thought he’d have, really. Oh, sure, Dad had insisted that his sons take on the mantle of the family business, become doctors in the name of saving people who were in danger of their lives or whatever. And it was right, he’d been right. But this? To be one of the top trauma surgeons in the region, in the country? A corner office, a department to himself? That was more than he could have asked for. It was more than Dad had ever dreamed of, more than Dad had expected of him or wanted for him if he was being honest with himself.

And maybe things hadn’t worked out with Lisa, but they’d parted on decent terms. They could still get together for the major holidays and for their son’s birthday, he’d stood up for her wedding to Matt only this past summer, they had a son. They had a beautiful, smart, wonderful son and they could afford to send him to private school, give him the absolute best that this city could offer.

When he sat back and looked at his life objectively, Dean Winchester was a very lucky man. 

His son finished telling him a story about how he and Parker and a child with the confusing given name of Huxton had routed some Year Fives in an exceptionally vicious game of dodgeball as a nurse stuck her head in. “Dr. Winchester?” Rachel interrupted, wincing when she saw him on the phone. “I’m sorry.”

“Excuse me, Ben,” he said into the phone, and muted the device. “What is it, Nurse?”

“We’ve got a couple of birds coming in,” she told him quickly. The whole staff knew how much he hated to be disturbed during Ben Time. “Apparently something happened offshore. We’ve got an FBI agent with a bullet in his shoulder, he’s lost a lot of blood, and a suspect with flail chest and pneumothorax, apparently both of them went into the water.” 

He frowned at her. Technically they weren’t supposed to get data like “suspect” and “agent.” They were supposed to treat all patients equally, regardless of anything that they’d done or had been trying to do. That kind of thinking would bring them dangerously close to playing God. Still, once the words were spoken they couldn’t be taken back. “Alright. Let me sign off with Ben and I’ll scrub in. Which residents are on call right now?”

“Samandriel, Ion, Inias and Welchert,” she replied promptly. “Dr. Walker is also on duty tonight.” 

Dean nodded. No matter what happened, he could count on Walker to be cool and professional. “Have Walker deal with the flail chest and have Samandriel and Ion assist. I’ll take Inias and Welchert with me; we’ll work on the Fed. I’m assuming that we’ve got two ORs available?”

“We’ll have to bump a C-section, but it was scheduled so they’re willing to wait an extra few hours,” Rachel confirmed. 

“Awesome,” Dean confirmed. “Give me five, alright?” She nodded and walked away, already barking out orders to her underlings. Dean turned back to the phone. “Sorry, buddy. We’ve got kind of an emergency here, and I need to go and operate.”

Dean would never get over the mix of hero worship and disappointment in his son’s voice when he had to cut their calls short like that. “It’s okay, Daddy. You’re saving lives, right?”

“That’s right, sport.” Had he sounded like that with their father? No, John Winchester would never allow for something that sounded so… so weak. Ben didn’t have responsibilities. He had a mother to take care of him, he had a stepfather. He distinctly did not have a brother to look after. No, he couldn’t let his mind go there, especially not before surgery. “I’ll tell you all about it this weekend, if I can. Okay?”

“Okay, daddy. I love you!”

“I love you too, Ben.” Dean hung up the phone and stared at it for a moment. If his father could see him now, pining for his son. He could hear the old man’s voice now. Suck it up, boy! You don’t have time to be moping around about the boy – he’s eight years old, he’s old enough to get over it! People are dying; you don’t have time to coddle him!

Some part of him glowered at his father’s ghost. Maybe he was pining over the time he was losing with his son. It was better than pining for the other person missing from his life, wasn’t it?

He shoved himself away from his desk, got up and went to go scrub in. 

Scrubbing in was a process. Oh, he understood the necessity of it. He got how people had died by the truckload because doctors hadn’t washed their hands before moving from an infected war wound to a newly parturient patient. What they didn’t tell you about in med school, though, was the ritual of the scrubbing. Decontaminating the clothes, the hands, the skin. Covering the hair, the mouth, the nose, restricting the surgeon’s very breath from polluting the air with the toxins of the outside world. No matter what was going on in Dean’s life outside the four walls of the operating room, it all got washed away by the harshest antibacterial soap known to man or stoppered up by surgical-grade masks and hair covers. Only his eyes were really exposed, and thanks to all of the curtains and cloths covering the patient to help maintain focus and objectivity even those weren’t subject to contamination.

He washed up carefully, let the nurse help him on with the surgical gown. “What’ve we got?”

“Male, early thirties, gunshot wound to the left shoulder. The injury is through-and-through,” explained Ellen, the orthopedist on duty. He could only see her eyes underneath the surgical mask and gown, but he’d know that Nebraska twang anywhere. “They’ve already got him down in x-ray, but the flight doc didn’t suspect any significant bone damage. Her biggest concern was the blood loss and soft tissue damage.” 

“Do we have any kind of blood work on our guy yet?” He angled his chest at the card reader and the OR door swung open. 

“No, but we’ve got some blood replacers and some PNSS and PLR waiting for him. Poor guy’s bleeding like a stuck pig still,” she pointed out. “They got it slowed but not stopped on the way here. It’s going to be messy, Dean.”

“Good thing someone else does the laundry around here then.” He wagged his eyebrows at her to show that he was joking and directed the residents to their places. Then they sat back to wait for the patient.

His x-rays arrived before he did, confirming the flight doctor’s initial diagnosis. “How did this guy manage to avoid bone involvement?” gasped Inias, pointing at the shadowy images indicating flesh. “I mean, that’s unreal!”

“He’s a lucky son of a bitch, that’s how,” Dean retorted. “See those little solid bits there?” He indicated a few small particles near the wound. “Looks like the bullet shattered on impact. That means we’re going to need to do some serious cleaning out of this wound. I’m guessing that we’ve got arterial involvement as well as some ligament and tendon damage right around there – there’s no way the guy’s that lucky. Anything else we should know?”

“The patient was pulled out of the water,” offered Rachel. “He jumped in after the other patient.” 

“Okay. So contamination might be a problem as well. Things to keep in mind.” He heard the approach of a gurney and knew that show time was on its way. “Look alive, people.”

The door to the OR flew open as the patient was brought in and set up for surgery. Dean and the team stayed out of the way for this part. The orderlies knew what they were doing and how to do it efficiently. They covered the patient’s body with cloths and hung curtains that obscured every part of him except for the left shoulder, the part Dean would be directly working on. He could see the anesthesiologist monitoring the man’s condition, but nothing of the man himself, and that was fine. It was best that way. A surgeon couldn’t go staring at his patients; he’d never get anything done. He had to be focused on the task at hand and only the task at hand.

Right now the task at hand was a shoulder with a blood-soaked bandage. A nurse Dean didn’t know stepped forward to carefully cut away the stopgap; as she disposed of the waste another stepped in to swab at the injury and the skin around it with iodine solution. Dean didn’t mind taking a moment to admire the shoulder; it was well defined under all the blood and crusted salt. There were a couple of moles here and there, not big ones but little dark spots that were actually pretty endearing. 

Sammy had had moles. 

The thought sprang to his mind, unbidden. It did that sometimes, no rhyme or reason to the memories. Sometimes he’d be working on a young kid, a skinny kid twelve or thirteen or something, and he’d remember Sammy. Or he’d drive through a college campus and he’d see some shaggy-haired beanpole standing there with his head and shoulders above the crowd. Other times his brother’s face would just seem to dance before him, when he was alone in his office or while he was by himself in the shower or just getting a rare moment in the sun between patients and rounds. He tried not to let it happen too often. He shouldn’t let it happen at all.

And he definitely shouldn’t let it happen at a time like this, when he had a patient on the table whose only commonality with Sam was gender and a few minor skin abnormalities. Sammy had been a broomstick with a wig on; this guy, judging by his shoulder, was built like a tank. He shouldn’t have any kind of ability to spark memories in Dean. The only thing this patient should inspire in Dean was focus. “Get the line in him,” he directed Inias. “Can’t have him bleeding out while we work. Scalpel.” 

Someone handed Dean a scalpel. He made a small incision and peeled back the skin, enough to give him a view. “Suction,” he directed, and an anonymous hand came along to vacuum out the blood and other junk – maybe seawater – that had collected in the joint. Dean held out a hand for a clamp to pinch off the artery; he’d need to close it up, but for now he needed to be able to see what he was working with. 

“Welchert, in here. Start clearing out those bullet fragments, would you?” Dean indicated that the resident should come and stand by his side and start working. In the meantime, he got to work. The patient had in fact sustained some ligament damage, but he and Ellen could easily fix that between the two of them. It wouldn’t even take long. They’d done this often enough that they didn’t even need to talk about it anymore.

Once the ligaments had been stitched together Ellen stepped back. Inias stepped forward to help with the blood vessels. The artery wasn’t the only damaged vessel in the shoulder but it was the most important one. Again, their patient had lucked out; the bullet had only nicked the artery instead of severing it. Otherwise the man with the impressively developed shoulders would be dead instead of just in a sling and in a world of hurt for a while. 

It took a while to close up all of the major vessel damage, but once that was done Welchert had gotten the debris out of the wound. They could close it up, stitch him up and send him on his merry way. Dean technically didn’t need to supervise the part with the stitches. Anyone could do stitches, a nurse practitioner could do stitches, they didn’t need a supervisor, but this was his surgery and his OR and if he was going to sign off on the process he was going to make sure it was all done right. They stitched up the incision first, and they stitched up the exit wound. Then they cleaned up the wound site again. “Might as well wash all that grime off of him while he’s unconscious,” Inias shrugged, and Dean couldn’t argue with that. After all, the patient would have a hard time washing it himself; hopefully he had someone at home who could help. Wife? Husband?

None of your business, Winchester, he reminded himself firmly as he bent down to inspect the stitches.

That was when he saw the scar.

His first thought, upon seeing the scar, was, “Sammy had a scar like that.” Sammy hadn’t just had a scar like that; Dean had put the scar there. They’d been horsing around, wrestling in the way that boys will, and Dean had put Sammy through one of those storm door windows. Their father had been pissed; they’d lost the deposit on the dump they were renting, and didn’t Sammy ever think about what that kind of horseplay cost them? And Sammy had just stood there, bleeding all over the place, into the carpet, wrecking his clothes, and nodded.

Dad hadn’t wanted to hear about how it had been an accident. And Sam hadn’t tried to tell him that it had been Dean’s fault, that Dean had pushed him. He’d just stood there and accepted their father’s ranting, taking one for the team.

Most of Sam’s cuts had been minor, not needing more than a little bit of gauze and some tape. This one, though – the shard had been large, and jagged, and it had gone right into Sammy’s shoulder like a knife. And it had twisted, too, enlarging the wound. Their father had refused to take them to the hospital wherever they’d been at the time. Dean couldn’t remember what Dad’s reasoning was, he was sure it made sense at the time, but instead he insisted that the boys patch themselves up. After all, they might as well get used to it; they were going to be doctors. 

So Dean had done the stitches on the stab wound, pulling the glass shard out gently and sewing his little brother’s flesh back together like precious silk. Sammy hadn’t made a sound, either, but Dean could feel him under his hands, hot and so tense he was practically vibrating. Dean had leaned in once the wound was closed. _“Kiss it better?” he offered with a smirk._

“Dr. Winchester?” Inias called, obviously not the first time he’d said it. “Are you okay?”

“Ye- yeah. I just – the patient reminded me of someone.” How Dean found his own voice in that moment he had no idea; the words poured forth without the conscious intervention of his brain. “Not a big deal. Send him to recovery, then get him a room. He’ll need to stay a day or two at least, and then physiotherapy and the rest.”

“Of course, Doctor.” Welchert side-eyed him as he led the way out of the OR.

The orderlies returned. Dean didn’t stay to watch them tear down the anonymity of surgery. He walked back into the scrub room as fast as his dignity would allow, tearing off his mask and his gown and his gloves and rushing to the shower. 

He scrubbed until his skin was pink, then red. It didn’t help. Even the usual ritual of re-dressing and heading back out into his office didn’t help. Ordinarily it cleansed the surgery from his mind, drew a sharp line between “OR Time” and the real world, but tonight it just left him feeling damp and chilled in addition to confused. He stumbled back to his office in a daze, oblivious to Rachel and Inias.

Once he was in the safety of his office he felt free to fall apart a little bit. Thirteen years was a long time. They’d been apart for thirteen years and not a word, not a note from the kid to even ask how he was doing, see how the family was. Instead he’d just come waltzing back into Dean’s life and demanded his care and attention like the past thirteen years hadn’t even happened –

Only he hadn’t really done that, had he? He’d come in unconscious, bleeding. Medflight wouldn’t have really given him a choice about where to go, they’d have just headed to the nearest trauma center. Sam probably didn’t even know where Dean was, didn’t know that they were in the same city. Why would he? It wasn’t like he gave a crap. And if he was FBI he might not even be assigned to Boston on a permanent basis. Maybe it was just coincidence. Maybe Sam wasn’t going to be around for very long. Maybe Dean could get away with letting this one slide, let one of the residents speak for him during rounds and just not have to deal with any of it.

After all, he had a life now. He had a job, a damn prestigious job. He had a career, damn it. He had a son, and while Lisa knew about him and Sammy she knew it as something in the past that would never, ever come up again. Sammy himself was in the past. If Sammy weren’t so much “in the past” anymore, would Lisa still let him see Ben? 

And Sammy, Sammy wouldn’t want to see him either. Sammy’d made that clear the night he walked out the door. He wasn’t going to be a doctor. He wasn’t going to live that life; he couldn’t live their father’s dreams for him. “But Sammy,” Dean pled. “That means leaving me, too.”

“It doesn’t have to,” his brother pointed out, tears in his eyes.

Dean snorted, feeling the old resentment coming back. Yeah, sure. It was great for Sam to sit there and cry his crocodile tears about living his life and all that, but he couldn’t seriously have expected Dean to just up and leave their father, leave Adam. If he didn’t know better, if he didn’t know that Dean was loyal to his family, well then that wasn’t on Dean. And all the protestations of, “We can be together in California, Dean,” and “No one out there needs to know we’re brothers, Dean,” hadn’t mattered, because at the end of the day Sam had still walked away. 

No, Sammy wouldn’t be any happier to see Dean than Dean would be to see him. It was best if they just stayed apart.

Part of Dean, though, wanted something else. It had been thirteen years for crying out loud. Maybe, if he saw Sam and they talked and what-the-hell-ever, they’d work their crap out and he’d realize that everything that had ever happened between them had only happened because of their father, because of the life they led. Lonely and isolated, it was only natural that they would turn to each other for comfort. Things were different now. Maybe seeing each other would exorcise those ghosts, let them be normal brothers. Ben could have another uncle, like Adam only even taller. Dean wouldn’t be feeling an empty spot at the holiday table and he wouldn’t have that terrible cold feeling deep in his chest every second day in May. They were grown men, successful adults. They could move on from everything that had happened. 

Dad had told Sam to stay away and never come back. Sam, for the first time in the history of ever, had followed orders. Dad was gone, though, killed by a warlord’s army in 2006. Why had Sammy stayed away for so long after that? 

He documented the surgery for the hospital’s records and his own. He filled out more paperwork, evaluating the performance of the residents. He read up on new experimental procedures for reattaching severed limbs; it sounded like magic, but if it could help restore and rebuild lives then why not? He paid his bills. 

He checked records. Sam Winchester was out of recovery and had been moved to a room. He’d been given a private room, probably out of deference to his position as an FBI agent. 

He would just walk past. That was all. He wouldn’t go in, he wouldn’t bug Sammy, he wouldn’t even look at him. He would just…check up. Like any other surgeon checking on any other patient. That was it.

This late at night, or maybe it was early in the morning, there wasn’t a lot of activity on the ward. Nurses checked on their patients and took their vitals, they did what was necessary, but for the most part the patients were asleep and the hallways were quiet. Sam’s room was at the end of the hall, the quietest part of the ward, which mostly made Dean happy. The guy needed rest most of all, and it wasn’t like he was in a lot of danger that he needed to be right in front of the nurse’s station. The light in his room, though, was on, and he didn’t like that much. “Excuse me,” he asked the nurse at the station. “What’s up with the patient in room 4337? He having trouble staying asleep or what?”

The nurse, an older woman in maroon scrubs, chuckled softly. “No, Dr. Winchester. He’s out like a little light. Okay, a giant light. But still. No, there’s an agent in there with him. I guess they didn’t want him to wake up alone or something.” She beamed. “That’s sweet.” 

Dean frowned. “I’m pretty sure that’s against hospital policy.” Agents in there with Sammy, huh? And what exactly was their relationship? Did Sammy have a girl on the side or something? A guy on the side, maybe? Dean had colleagues, he had friends, he had good friends, but they weren’t the kind of friend that kept up a bedside vigil. 

“Dr. Winchester, it’s just like any other time a cop gets shot. They get protective, and I’m pretty sure we can understand that. The woman who’s in there now said she’s done this for him before, so I think that it’s something that must be protocol or something.” 

She, Dean thought, as jealousy stabbed through him. “Protocol. Okay. I’m just going to go peep in there.”

“Suit yourself, but don’t go waking my patient,” she shrugged. 

Dean nodded. In the OR, he was in charge. On the ward, he’d never dream of crossing a nurse. Especially not one who had been there for a while. He crept down the hall, silent as the night itself, until he was at the door to Sammy’s room.

Sammy lay in the bed, still unconscious. Well, he’d lost a lot of blood and been through some serious trauma besides; he was allowed to sleep it off a bit. He’d been dressed in a hospital johnny, although where they found one that fit all that bulk was anyone’s guess. Sammy was stacked. His hair had gotten longer, too. Wasn’t the FBI supposed to be all about the buzz cuts and apple pie look? Asleep, and drugged to the gills, he still looked young and innocent. 

Dean squirmed. Yeah, meeting up was definitely going to be a bad idea.

A woman looked up from the chair by Sam’s side – sharply, as though alerted to a threat. Hell, her hand was on a gun. Dark eyes narrowed inside a heart-shaped face. “Can I help you?” she asked in a quiet voice that was anything but soft.

He held his hands up to show that he had no ill intent. “I’m just checking on the patient, ma’am.” He slowly held up his ID badge. “I’ll be leaving now.”

“Yeah. You do that.” Her hand did not move from the hilt of that gun, and her eyes stayed glued to Dean as the surgeon backed away from the door. 

Alrighty then. So Sammy had some kind of goon squad – a hot goon squad – looking out for him. That had been his job once, but that hadn’t been good enough for Sammy, had it? “I’m always gonna look out for you, Sammy. Don’t think you can get away from that.” 

He scurried back to his office and called Benny. Benny, he was good people. He would be willing to help a guy out here. “’Lo?” the Cajun muttered into his phone. 

“Benny, it’s me.” At the silence that greeted him, Dean sighed. “Dean. Benny, it’s Dean. I need a favor from you.”

Benny’s answering groan brought a ghost of a grin to Dean’s face. “Brother, it is four o’clock in the morning. Do you have any idea what I was doing?”

“Burying your face in the pillow just now from the sound of it,” Dean guessed. “Listen. This is big. It’s… I need you to help me out with my rounds tomorrow.”

His friend sighed, probably pulling himself into a sitting position. “Dean, I’m a psychiatrist. I know exactly enough about surgery to keep those M. D. letters after my name. I ain’t qualified to be pokin’ and proddin’ at holes in people’s bodies less’n it’s for fun.” 

Ugh. “That is absolutely, positively the last thing on my mind right now, Benny. Look. There’s a patient, he showed up on my OR table last night.”

“Well, they tend to do that, Dean. Seeing as how you’re a trauma surgeon and all that.” Benny was awake now, even if he wasn’t exactly thrilled about it.

“Well, yeah. The thing is, I didn’t know the patient’s name or anything. That’s how I work.”

“I know, Dean. We’ve talked about this.”

“Well, I recognized the patient after the fact, from a mark on the part I was operating on. I should’ve probably recognized it beforehand, but it was covered in blood so I didn’t really see it - anyway, I should’ve recused myself from operating on the guy because of the personal connection. But I didn’t, because I didn’t know. So I’d like – I need – for a colleague I can trust to come along and help me explain to this poor guy why it was me cutting him open.” There, that was enough to give him over the phone, wasn’t it? 

Not that Benny was buying it. “Uh-huh. Sure, Winchester. So why not just have Ellen talk to the guy? I’m sure she was right there for the surgery too.” 

Dean sighed. “Yeah, no. You want a bone doc to be the gentle voice of reason? With a federal agent? Someone’s going to get shot.”

“An’ it just might be Ellen doin’ the shootin,’” the psychiatrist had to admit. “Those Feds ain’t known for their sense of humor.” 

“And Ellen isn’t known for taking a lot of pushback,” Dean grinned. “It’s why we love her.” 

Benny groaned. “Okay, brother. But I can promise you this. You’d better be outside that patient’s room at six fifty this morning. And you’re taking me out to dinner and you’re explaining every dirty detail about why you need someone else there to make sure you two play nice.” 

“Best steak dinner you’ve ever had,” he promised.

Dean returned to the corridor outside Sam’s room at six forty-five, having drunk three urns’ worth of coffee and still not feeling any better. He waited about two doors away; he did not need to have Agent Trigger-Happy seeing him creeping around Sammy’s room again. Neither did he need for her to hear the conversation he was about to have with Benny. She just wouldn’t understand so much of what was going on, and he didn’t necessarily want the past to ricochet back on Sammy any more than he wanted it to come back on him. He straightened up when he saw his old friend coming down the hallway, drawing puzzled looks from the nurses. “Dr. Lafitte,” he greeted in a normal tone. “I’m glad you could make it.” He handed Benny the file on Sammy’s surgery. 

Benny looked good for a guy whose sleep had been so interrupted. “Tell me what’s really going on, Dr. Winchester,” he sighed in a quieter voice.

Dean sighed. He knew he wouldn’t be able to pull the wool over Benny’s eyes for long. “Okay. That…patient…from last night? The one I accidentally operated on?” Benny nodded, and Dean took a deep breath. “Right. He’s my brother.”

Benny shook his head. “Dean, Adam’s not going to care that you operated on his damn shoulder. He’s going to be happy it was you and not some hack, okay?”

Dean cleared his throat and lowered his voice even more. “No. Not Adam. My, uh. My other brother.”

Benny knew. Oh, did Benny ever know. He was one of the few entrusted with the secret, because he was a psychiatrist and he knew things. The whole theory about how it had probably happened because of the lifestyle had been his, after all. Dean knew that he’d made the connection when he saw his friend’s face turn several shades paler under the beard. “You’re joking.”

“Dumb fucking luck, right? But, uh, I can’t go in there. I can’t go in there and tell him that out of all of the hospitals in goddamn New England they brought him to mine after a suspect shot him, and that I’m the one who…” He shook his head. “Just…I can’t do it, Benny.”

“Dean,” Benny objected. “Come on, brother. You can do this. You have to. You haven’t seen this guy in thirteen years, man. Don’t you think it’s time that you got some closure? That you both did? It’s going to be fine. I’ll be right here with you, nothing bad’s going to happen. You can face him, Dean.”

“No. No, Benny, I can’t. I mean, I’m not sure I even want to, but I know I can’t. I mean if he wanted to see my face he’d have called before he got shot, you know? And…it’s just not right. We can’t be around each other. It’s not right for him and it’s not right for me. Just…please, brother. Do this one thing, it’s easy, explain the post-surgical care, it’s right there in my notes. I can’t even look at him, Benny. I just can’t.” 

Dean hadn’t realized that his voice was rising, but he didn’t care. He ran, like a coward, down to his car and drove back home. 


	2. I'm Watching Music I Can't Hear

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam overhears something and is reminded that no one ever overhears anything good about themselves.

Sam had passed out after getting pulled from the water with the suspect, so he knew that if he survived he’d probably wake up in a hospital somewhere. When consciousness returned, therefore, with the accompanying marching band of heart monitors and oxygen machines and distant bells and whistles he didn’t panic. He just kept his eyes shut and waited for his body to process the grogginess. Only then did he open his eyes.

As he expected, he had indeed landed in a hospital. It looked like every other hospital. His eyes traveled to the window side of the bed, where they landed on the dark hair and heart-shaped face of Meg. She smirked when she saw them. “Nice to see you’ve decided to join us,” she drawled, scrolling on her tablet. “I thought you might sleep the entire day away, there, hot stuff.” 

He considered. Sleeping the day away might be an option, at that. “They tell you when they’re letting me out of here?” He’d pulled more than a few all-nighters in the run up to capturing O’Sullivan; a few hours of non-anesthetized shut-eye would probably not be a terrible plan.

“Nope. Some guy in a white coat came creeping around a little before four, but something tells me that they don’t exactly give discharge instructions in the wee small hours.” She put her tablet aside. “I didn’t like him. He looked sketchy.” 

“You think everyone looks sketchy, Meg.” He took stock of his physical state. His arm hurt. He could feel the stitches; he could have done a better job himself for crying out loud. He didn’t think he could move it, not without a lot of help at this point, which should make getting dressed fun. 

“Everyone is sketchy.” She shrugged. “Prove me wrong.”

He thought about it. “The girl in the coffee shop down in the lobby.” 

“Her hair is a shade of blue not found in nature, Sam. Totally sketchy. Plus I see the way she eyes you. She so totally wants a slice of Special Agent Beefcake.”

He scoffed. “Does not. I’m pretty sure she’s a lot more interested in –" He held up a hand. He’d heard a name he hadn’t heard in years, just outside in the hall. It was distant, maybe a couple of doors down, but Sam had made a career out of eavesdropping and in several languages to boot. He could absolutely pick out the name “Dean” in a crowd. 

Especially when someone else had called out for “Dr. Winchester” first.

Meg fell silent, used to his cues by now. They both strained their ears. “No, not Adam. My, uh. My other brother.” It had been thirteen years, but Sam knew that voice. How could he forget it? Maybe it was a little older, maybe it was a little deeper or harsher, but it was still his. 

The other voice murmured something to Dean about closure, about “facing” Sam. As though Sam was the one who had done something wrong. “Nothing bad’s gonna happen to you,” the Louisiana-accented voice assured his brother. 

Sam’s stomach turned. Thirteen years, no contact, Sam had been freaking shot and Dean didn’t even want to see him now. Because Sam had been the bad guy, and Dean couldn’t handle facing him. His hand – the only one that was moving anywhere, right now – trembled. Meg reached out and put a hand on his arm, grounding him. 

“I can’t even look at him, Benny,” Dean was saying, in a thick, choked voice. Choked with fear, Sam realized. Fear of him. “I just can’t.” 

Sam looked down at the blanket. He hadn’t known that Dean was in Boston until a few seconds ago. Hearing that, that indictment was almost more than he could bear. He took a deep breath. He’d survived getting disowned. He’d survive this. Right?

At least now he had Meg. She dropped her voice and switched languages as footsteps approached his half-open door. “You going to be okay?” she murmured in Farsi.

It was a language she’d taught him herself, once they’d gotten through their old rivalry. It was her mother’s native tongue, her first language, and had stood them both in good stead, working in counterterrorism, not that they’d found themselves needing it on many terrorism cases. They used it more often between themselves, either when they needed to speak privately or when they wanted to reassure the other that they had their back.

He grimaced. “Ask me again in a couple of hours,” he confessed. She’d heard everything he had, after all. Pretending he was fine would just be insulting. 

A man strode into the room, face red and eyes blazing. He probably stood about six feet tall, with brown hair and a beard and a white coat. For all his obvious discomfort – and the words Sam had overheard – he forced a pleasant smile onto his face. “You must be Sam Winchester. I’m Dr. Benjamin Lafitte. I’m a psychiatrist here at Boston General.”

Sam kept his face neutral. He wanted to lash out, to break something, but honestly he was in too much pain. “A psychiatrist.”

“Yes, sir. I specialize in –”

“Gunshot wounds?” Meg interrupted, raising an eyebrow. “Not sure that I see the logical progression from ‘Boston mobster shoots him in the chest’ to ‘send in the psychiatrists.’ I mean, I get that we’re both new in town but come on. SOP is SOP.” 

Lafitte stared at her for a moment. “And you are?”

“Special Agent Meg Masters. I’m Agent Winchester’s partner.”

“Well, partner or not I’m not sure that I should be discussing his surgery or his care with you,” he tried.

Sam cleared his throat. “I’m fairly certain that under HIPAA, as the patient, I get to decide whether Agent Masters is present for any discussion of my treatment.” He let himself give a very thin smile, the “lawyer” smile that usually got suspects to give up without a fight. “Or are you planning to tell two federal agents that you don’t believe that those rules apply to you?”

Lafitte blinked. “Mr. Winchester, you’ve been heavily medicated –”

“Check again, doctor,” Meg purred. “I had the nurses take him off the hard stuff after he was brought in here.” 

“I’m not a fan of substances that make me lose control of my own mind,” Sam informed. Dean hadn’t just sent in a stranger, he’d sent in a goddamn shrink. Well, maybe he could’ve used one thirteen years ago, or, hell, twenty years ago, but now it was a little too late and this guy was hardly an unbiased resource. “I am choosing to allow Agent Masters to be present. Do we need to reach out to your legal department?”

Now Sam was just being a dick, and he knew it. Benny flinched but he sighed. “Look, Sam –”

“Agent,” Meg corrected.

Lafitte bit the inside of his cheek. “Agent,” he ground out. “Some things may come out in the course of this discussion that are private, that you may not want your co-workers involved with.”

“What, you mean like the fact that my brother sent a psychiatrist in to do my surgical debrief because he couldn’t stand to look me in the eye?” Sam shot back, cool and calm. 

Benny froze. “You heard all that, then.”

“We’re professional eavesdroppers, Dr. Lafitte. Did Sam’s brother not mention the whole FBI thing? Listening in on conversations other people don’t want us to hear – it’s kind of what we get paid to do,” Meg smirked.

“Agent Masters is a friend.” Sam took pity on the doctor then. Dean had left him in a lurch, just kind of sent him in blind, and however Sam might feel about the situation none of it was Lafitte’s fault. “A very good friend. You can speak freely in front of her.”

Lafitte sighed deeply. “Okay. Well. The first thing I’m going to freely say is that I ain’t qualified to tell you jack shit about recovering from surgery or about a gunshot wound. He called me up and asked me to come with him because he’d gotten jammed up on a surgery – said he didn’t know who the patient was until after the surgery when all the blood was cleared away. Then he saw a scar and he recognized ‘the patient’ from the scar. He should’ve recused himself from operating on you and he would have if he’d known.”

Sam snorted. “No shit.”

“Naw, it ain’t like that. A surgeon ain’t supposed to cut anyone he knows, anyone at all. It’s too much of an emotional bond, it messes with their heads.” He waved a hand. “That much I do believe. I’ve known him for a while now, ever since he came to Boston General, and he does everything very properly and by the book. It wouldn’t be unusual for him to want an established physician to come and be a neutral party in a situation like this. That’s why I agreed.

“What I did not agree to – and what I’m sure as hell going to take out of his hide for later on – is getting sent in here to try to debrief you on a procedure I know nothing about. The legal department will have a field day about this; the man knows better.”

“Hand me the report,” Sam directed.

“Excuse me?” Lafitte blinked.

“My father raised us all with the expectation that we’d be doctors, all of us. I didn’t exactly conform, but I can still read a surgical report well enough to figure out what was done, what needs to be done and what the possible complications are.” He grimaced. “I’m very sorry that you were put into the middle of Winchester family drama, Dr. Lafitte.”

“Ah, now, Agent. I might not be very good at surgical reports but family drama’s kind of my bread and butter.” He gave a slow smile as he passed over the report.

Sam scanned it quickly. The injury had been fairly straightforward; the tendon damage had been easily fixed and he should be able to start using the joint again in a couple of weeks. Well, the report said four weeks but Sam had no intention of waiting that long to get back to work. Possible complications included infection – seriously? Had he needed to write that down? “I’m afraid that our drama is a little more melodramatic than most people can stomach. This doesn’t include discharge instructions.” 

“Well, no.” He took the report back. “You took a tumble into questionable waters, Agent. Infection is a very real concern; you really need to stay here at least another day so we can make sure you didn’t get any creepy-crawlies in there.” 

Sam rolled his eyes. “Sorry, but I’m not going to be doing that. I get that there’s a history between us, that he isn’t exactly down to welcome me back into the family fold or anything. And I’ll respect that, I will. But if my surgeon can’t even come into my room to check the results of the operation the day after, then this is a hospital I don’t want to stay at. I can keep the incision clean and watch for signs of infection at home; if I have any problems I’ll go to Mt. Auburn.”

Lafitte sighed. “I can’t say as I blame you. I’m going to have to strongly advise against it, though.” He grimaced. “I mean, would it really be so bad to see him again?”

“Agent Winchester isn’t the one who sent an unqualified person in here to do his job while he ran and hid from his own actions,” Meg snapped. “Sam’s not the one who decided a reunion was a bad thing. Sam didn’t get to make a choice at all.” 

Lafitte folded his lips together. “Alright. Well, I still think it’s a bad idea to be off that IV antibiotic drip, and you lost a ton of blood.”

“Which has been sufficiently replaced that I’m unlikely to drop dead,” Sam retorted. “Please have someone get the AMA paperwork. And I’m not asking you to go passing notes or anything, but I know you’re going to see Dean. Dr. Winchester,” he corrected himself, numbness growing in his hands and feet as he did so. “You can go ahead and let him know that I respect his decision. Again.” 

Lafitte looked like he wanted to say something, to stick up for Dean somehow, but a look at Meg’s face had him running. He came back after just a moment with the appropriate paperwork. “I’d like for you to reconsider your decision, Agent,” he said, handing over the paperwork.

Sam shook his head. “I can’t stay here. Not after hearing that.” 

“Agent Winchester won’t be staying someplace that discriminates against him on the basis of his sexuality,” Meg pointed out in an even tone.

“Now wait just a minute,” Lafitte objected, frowning. “This ain’t about –”

“Isn’t it? Maybe you should talk to Dr. Winchester about that. I know he’s perfectly familiar with Agent Winchester’s stated sexuality, I know that he refused to treat Agent Winchester properly as he would any other patient and I know exactly how our supervisor will see it when she kicks this up to our Civil Rights unit.” She smiled a sharks’ smile. “Endangering the life of a federal agent because of one doctor’s attitudes about what men ‘should’ do? That’s not going to create great press for Boston General, Dr. Lafitte.”

Sam wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or cry. No one was going to report anything to the guys investigating hate crimes, not in the least because Sam wasn’t about to go there and Meg knew it. The statute of limitations had long since run out on what had gone on between him and Dean but that didn’t mean that the general public would see things as being “in the past,” and he knew damn well that no one would care that he’d been a kid.

Lafitte, though, he didn’t know that Meg was bluffing, just standing up for him. He only knew that the petite woman standing before him was going to eat him alive. “Look, ma’am, I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” he said, turning even paler. “I’m going to…I don’t know, talk to Dean. Damn it, this is the last time I do him a favor.” He glowered at the door. 

Sam was already signing papers. He wasn’t about to sue, but he wasn’t staying. “He shouldn’t have put you in that position. I’m sorry he did. I’ll be out of your hair as soon as I can get dressed.” 

The psychiatrist sighed. “Well. Okay then. At least let me help get you dressed.” He offered Meg a wry grin. “I have no doubt – no doubt at all – about your ability to take down drug dealers, Mafiosi and miscreants of every type, but I ain’t even sure that I can reach to help him on with his shirt, ma’am.” 

At least Meg was willing to relent a little bit with that. She quirked up a little bit of a grin. “I don’t know. It’s not like this is our first rodeo.” She backed off, though, and let this Lafitte character help him get some clothes on. 

The man gave him a card and a copy of the discharge instructions, most of which said, “Don’t,” and Sam was free to go. He and Meg took a cab back to the townhouse in Arlington and charged it back to the Bureau. Meg, of course, lost no time in updating Agent Mills as to the situation as soon as they got into the cab. Sam tuned her out and tried not to blush.

They saved the honest conversation for the townhouse. The place still smelled new, and looked about as personal as a waiting room. They hadn’t been moved in for a month yet and had ordered the furniture and everything online. Sam staggered over to the couch and collapsed onto it with a groan. “Sorry you had to sit through that,” he told her. 

“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to be there,” she retorted. “What are the odds that I can convince you to eat some soup?”

He cringed. He could do that here, in the house. “Uh…no. Sorry. I don’t think I can hold anything down yet.”

“Fair enough. For the record, Jody wants to arrest your brother.” 

Sam sat back up. “What? On what charges?”

“General fuckery in the first degree. Also assault on a federal officer, since this whole sending in a fucking psychiatrist to do the post-surgery exam is malpractice and highly inappropriate. Of course, so is molesting your little brother so I’m not so sure that his moral compass is exactly aligned properly.” She snorted. “Not that that needed to come up with Jody, but you know.”

Sam winced. “Yeah, I’m not seeing that as going over well.” He leaned back and rested his head against the top of the couch. Everything hurt, the pain from the gunshot and the surgery just radiated out until it set off every nerve in his body. In a way that was kind of good; it distracted him from everything in his head. 

“You were just a kid, Sam,” Meg told him, sitting beside him. “It’s not your fault.”

He shrugged. “Apparently it was. Dean seems to think so.” He closed his eyes. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Apparently it does,” she told him, a hand on his arm. “Since it just got you denied proper medical treatment. And it might again, you know? He’s in the same city. You could get hurt again.” 

“So I’ll go to the Brigham or to Mass General. Mount Auburn, hell, it’s closer to our house. I’m sure we don’t live anywhere close to each other, it’s a big city, there’s no reason under the sky why we should ever have to see each other again.” And that hurt. It didn’t make sense that it hurt. After all, he’d gone the past thirteen years without seeing Dean and without having the possibility of seeing Dean. Another thirteen or thirty or sixty or whatever shouldn’t be a stabbing agony that made the post-surgery pain pale in comparison. And yet it was. Always in the back of Sam’s mind, he supposed, there was a might-have-been. If things had been different, if Dad had loosened the leash on Dean, if Sam himself had been willing to chance it just a little bit, maybe he could have kept Dean. Kept Dean in his life, at least. Still had some kind of family. It was just a fantasy, he’d known that it was just a fantasy, but it had still been this little light at the back of his head. Something to take out and hold on the bad days, he guessed. 

Now he knew, definitively, that the fantasy was a joke, a delusion. One of the many, he supposed, that had come back to bite him in the ass over the years. Dean had never been willing to have him back, neither as a lover nor as a brother. He was so disgusted by what they’d done that the mere thought of being in a room with Sam, even after all this time, had sent him running for the hills and had him willing to risk a lawsuit for his hospital rather than have his pure eye contaminated by Sam’s filthy skin.

_Now remember, Sammy, this isn’t something we can talk about to other people._

Yeah, sure, Sam understood the shame. He felt it too, at least as strong as Dean must. And it wasn’t as though he necessarily thought falling back into bed with his big brother was a good idea or even something that he wanted to do. Yeah, sure, sometimes he missed the comfort of having someone with the same set of memories, someone who understood where he was coming from, but he wasn’t the same kid anymore. A lot had changed in thirteen years.

But to know that he was such an object of disgust, when once it had been all Dean could do to keep his hands off him in public – that hurt. It was a pain that sent him reeling. “Sam,” Meg told him, once again touching his arm lightly. They weren’t demonstrative when it came to their friendship, not as a general rule. This was as close as they usually got. Sam didn’t do the touchy-feely thing, not really. He’d never been one for much physical contact with anyone but Dean, and after everything it just didn’t make him feel comfortable anymore. “Sam. I mean yes, there’s no reason that you’ll ever have to come into contact with him. You’re a professional and you can get through this. I’ve seen you get through more, right?”

Sam nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, of course. The transfer is a good thing still. This is going to be a good change.”

“Right. And Jody’s a good supervisor. You’ve got friends; you’ve got people who have your back. We’re not going to let anything happen to you. You understand that, right? We’ve got your back.” 

Sam nodded and blew out a long, slow breath. He’d survived torture, literal torture. He could get through living in the same geographic area as his older brother.

Meg helped Sam get up the stairs and undressed, staying nearby so that he could shower without fear of falling. He was so incredibly lucky to have her in his life, he reflected. They’d transferred from counterterrorism together, and it was a good thing too. For starters, not a lot of single guys had someone close enough to them that they could call on to help them get cleaned up after getting shot and jumping into the Atlantic. She helped him get a pair of sweats on before putting a new dressing onto his shoulder and tucking him into bed, where he was ordered to stay “until I say you can leave.”

He closed his eyes and let darkness surround him. He didn’t wake until much later that afternoon, when the arrival of Jody Mills brought a fresh face and a new injection of outrage from someone who hadn’t even met Dean. Meg woke him first and helped him sit up, so at least Jody wasn’t seeing him drooling into the pillow like some kind of infant, but she still got admission to his bedroom while he didn’t have a shirt on. He guessed that he was okay with that; this was Jody, after all. She was a friend and she’d seen him in worse states.

She hugged him gently and exclaimed over the wound. “Apparently you hit the suspect hard enough to give him flail chest,” she chided. “He’s going to be in the ICU for a while; I guess that flail chest and the nice chilly waters of the Atlantic don’t make for a healthy combination. I’ve already had words with hospital administrators about why a suspect in a multi-state kidnap and murder spree is more entitled to basic care than a decorated veteran agent; I expect to be hearing from their legal department soon.” 

Sam sighed. “I really don’t want to take it to a lawsuit, Jody,” he admitted. “I mean, it’s family stuff and there’s family stuff that never needs to see the light of day, you know?”

She patted his hand, sitting down beside his leg. “I know, sweetie. I mean, I don’t know in your specific case, but I think all families have that kind of ‘Oh God no’ factor. But I’m also pretty sure that Boston General isn’t going to want to have anything to do with that kind of publicity, and I really want them to come down like a ton of bricks on Dr. Winchester. I mean, it’s one thing to realize that he shouldn’t have operated on you because he knew you and had a grudge, after the fact. It’s another thing to send in someone who wasn’t competent to talk to you. But – that’s something for later. Right now, let’s talk about you.”

“I’m fine,” Sam told her, meeting her eyes.

“Sam, you were shot and you can’t move your left arm.” She sat back and gave him a little frown. The other agents called that her “mom look,” not that Sam had any basis for comparison. “You are not ‘fine.’ You get to take some paid time off because of the injury.” He grimaced. What the hell was he going to do with paid time off, especially if Meg was still on the clock? Haunt Arlington like some kind of ghost? The town probably had plenty of its own without him looming among the tilting gravestones in the churchyard. “I really don’t need to do that, ma’am,” he told her earnestly. “I should be able to rock desk work in a couple of days, just as soon as I can shrug my way into a dress shirt. And I’ll be out of the sling in two weeks.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t even get a post-surgical consult, how the hell do you even know you’ll be out of that contraption in two weeks?”

“Grew up in the field, remember? I’ll be fine. The O’Sullivan case isn’t wrapped up, I can work on paperwork. I can do interviews, I can help process warrant requests, there is literally nothing I can’t do except two-handed pull-ups.” He held her gaze, knowing that the slightest indication that this was a desperation thing would get him a referral for counseling. 

She hesitated, but finally nodded. “Fine.” She held up a hand. “But there are conditions. You need to stay at home for another three days, which shouldn’t be a problem given that two of them are weekend days. And you have to let a friend of mine come over and have a look at you. She’s a doctor, so for my peace of mind and just to have an actual professional who specializes in the mechanics of the human body and not the human brain take a look at the injury and how you’re healing I won’t let you come back to work until Dr. Roberts has examined the wound. She’ll come over here, tomorrow at noon.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “A doctor who makes housecalls? I knew Massachusetts was old-fashioned but really…” 

She laughed. “Well she doesn’t do it for most patients but she’s willing to make an exception after I explained the situation. Do we have a deal?”

He sighed. Having a stranger come over to the house was less than ideal and he was definitely unenthusiastic about having some stranger put her hands on him, but if it was the only way that he was going to get back to work and out of the house he’d take it. “Deal,” he agreed, holding out his hand. 

The next three days passed in a haze of pain and fatigue. He met with Dr. Roberts, who turned out to be a stunningly pretty woman with huge dark eyes that sparkled. She had met Dr. Winchester at a conference, she told him, and she was surprised that he’d behaved the way he had. “He didn’t particularly strike me as homophobic or biphobic or whatever,” she continued. “I mean sure, he came off as a bit of a horn dog, but I guess he was just coming off a divorce so that’s normal. I guess it’s different sometimes when it’s in your family.” She shook her head. “It’s a damn shame, I can tell you that.” 

“Dean’s married?” Sam blurted. “Or was married, I guess?”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, you didn’t know? Well, I guess you wouldn’t. Sorry. Yeah. They split up. They’re friendly enough; he stood up for her second wedding. An orthopedist at a different hospital,” she confirmed. “I guess she has a type.” 

“I suppose she must.” Dean had gone off and gotten married. Dad must have been spinning in his grave. Sam’s stomach was spinning in its. He’d been so far from being attached to Sam’s memory at all that he’d gone off and gotten married.

The doctor recommended a physical therapist, who Sam had absolutely no intention of seeing, and wanted to see him again in two weeks to re-evaluate. Still, she thought that the surgical work looked good and didn’t see any signs of infection so that was something. He was free to return to desk duty and to physical activity that did not involve the use of his arm, such as certain forms of cardio. “You don’t look like the type to listen if I told you not to,” she commented, glancing at his body. 

He shrugged with one shoulder. “I don’t like sitting still.”

“No, I suppose that you don’t.” She passed him a card. “Give me a call if anything comes up or if you have any questions, alright?” 

After she left he had the leisure to contemplate Dean’s marriage and his own reactions to it. Yeah, his initial reaction was jealousy. That was stupid. He didn’t have the right to be jealous. Of course Dean had moved on. He’d moved on as soon as Sam had moved out. Dean hadn’t even been faithful while they’d been together – “too risky, Sammy,” he’d insisted, although none of the relationships he’d pursued had lasted. 

And Sam, when he was thinking beyond that first visceral reaction, wanted Dean to be happy. He wanted Dean to be with someone who could make him happy, and that someone hadn’t ever been him. Not really. Maybe the marriage hadn’t lasted, but he’d been happy enough with the woman in question that they’d given it a shot, right? Maybe Dean had found someone else, someone new that he could spend the rest of his life with and start a family with. Someone who could make him happy and give him children and make those green eyes of his light up. That was what Sam wanted for him, that was all that Sam wanted for him.

Maybe Sam was jealous. He wasn’t jealous of the fact that Dean had found someone else, had found happiness with someone who wasn’t Sam. Not entirely, anyway – sure, it was natural to be a little bit jealous of that, right? If he was being honest, though, he had to admit that he was jealous that Dean had managed to find that apple-pie life at all. He’d always looked down on Sam for wanting that in the first place, always bought wholeheartedly into John Winchester’s philosophy of complete devotion to the mission. And yet he’d managed to settle, build a life, have a home and whatever else. 

That had been Sam’s dream, for as long as he could remember. After all this time he’d finally accepted that it wasn’t part of his future. With this move he hadn’t even bothered getting a full sized bed; a twin was good enough for him. He’d bought a place with Meg, because there wasn’t much point in getting a place of his own. He worked, and he slept, and he woke up to do it all over again. 

And that was okay – it was just the way things had worked out. It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried for something in addition to the job, but things hadn’t lined up in a way that was conducive to building the kind of life that Dean had. It was just the way life worked sometimes. Maybe “jealous” wasn’t the word, if he thought about it carefully. Maybe “wistful” was a better term. 

Maybe, like everything else connected with the name “Dean,” a life outside the Bureau or in addition to the Bureau was always destined to be wrapped up in the land of might-have-beens. His life with the Bureau wasn’t a bad one. There had been some episodes he sure hadn’t enjoyed, but the Bureau had his back. He had people like Meg and Jody. He did important work, saving people and keeping the world safe from some truly terrible human beings. He had everything he needed, and if there was something else that he wanted on top of that – well, that was just something that he could live without. 

Sam buried himself in his work, as he had so often before. 


	3. Staring Down Some Invisible Fear

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A conspiracy takes place to try to help the Winchester brothers try to get through their issues. It goes about as well as you might expect.

Dean should have known better than to think that running would get him anywhere, and if he were being honest with himself he’d admit that he never really thought that it would. He’d just wanted to get away, but it hadn’t lasted long. He’d gotten as far as his house before his phone rang, with Benny filling his ears with profanity. “I thought that woman was gonna eat me, Winchester! And I don’t mean in the fun sexy way!” his old friend had exploded. “Also she’s talking lawsuit and she’s right!” 

Dean had to laugh at that one, because there was no way in hell that Sam was taking it to that level. A lawsuit? Really? 

So he’d crashed and let oblivion welcome him. A few short hours later, though, he got a call from Bobby Singer, Chief Medical Officer for the whole hospital. He was Dean’s boss, and he was one of the few people who Dean’s phone was set to allow calls from even when the “Do Not Disturb” was on. “Hello?” he groaned into the phone.

“You’re in a heap of trouble, Winchester.” Bobby’s tone wasn’t angry, per se. It wasn’t friendly either. “I just got a call from Supervisory Special Agent Jody Mills. She’s in charge of the Boston field office for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and I’ve known her for a good while, Dean.” 

Fuck. “Yes, sir.” 

“It seems she’s got her dander up about one of her agents being denied basic post-surgical care – I believe her exact words were ‘treated worse than a criminal who went on a multi-state kidnap and kill spree’ – due to ‘one of your surgeon’s bias regarding said agent’s sexuality.’ She was good and angry, son.”

Fuck fuck fuck. “Sir, it wasn’t like that.” “I sure as hell hope that it wasn’t. Nevertheless, that’s a formal complaint she made.” 

The implications hit Dean like a boot to the chest. “You’re joking.”

“Nope. It’s already been kicked to the legal department.” 

“Oh, for crying out loud, Bobby, you know I’m not like that. I don’t care what someone does with his…I’m not like that.” He pulled the other pillow over his face.

“Then explain to me why you and I are going to a meeting with the head of Legal tomorrow morning at eight AM sharp.” 

Dean sighed. “I didn’t know it was my brother until I saw the scar, after the blood was cleared away, okay? We’ve been estranged for over ten years. I panicked, I freaked out. Yes, I should have had Ellen do the post-op meeting. I didn’t do that, I was too…I was distraught. This is why we don’t have surgeons operate on family members, or people they know.” He sighed. “I thought that Benny might…I mean, Benny knows more of my history with Sammy. I figured he’d be someone who might be able to talk to him better. I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking, I was panicking.”

“Well, your little bout of fraternal angst is going to wind up costing the hospital big. Hopefully he’ll be willing to settle out of court and keep this out of the papers.” Singer sighed. “Damn it, Dean. It’s a good thing you’re such a fine surgeon.” 

“I’ve never given the hospital any trouble before this, Bobby. You know I haven’t.” He sat up. This absolutely could not be happening. Sammy had at least as much to lose from this as he did, at least as much.

“I know. I know you haven’t, son. This kind of thing, though, it’s big. Especially around here, right now. You get that, right?”

“Absolutely, sir.”

“Your brother has it in his power to absolutely destroy your career, Dean,” Bobby mentioned after a moment. “Why would he want to do that to you?”

“I don’t know, Bobby,” Dean sighed. “I mean, he shouldn’t even know that I was the surgeon, but if he found out it was me maybe?”

“What, you saved his arm and that’s grounds for a lawsuit?” The older doctor snorted. “My family was screwed up but that’s one screwed-up brother.”

“Yeah, well, that’s Sammy to a T,” Dean told him, not even bothering to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Dad, uh, you know what he wanted for us. All three of us.”

“He wanted you to be doctors.”

“Well, yeah. But not just doctors.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose and tried to stave off the impending headache. “He wanted us to be his kind of doctor. Out there in the field like him, saving people the way he did. Field doctors, I guess. Sammy always hated that kind of life, hated moving around, hated the whole idea. He and Dad never stopped butting heads. Tell you the truth, I used to kind of worry about leaving them together when I left for college. Used to think I’d come home and maybe one of ‘em would be dead, and I wasn’t sure which one it would be. Dad got him into the pre-med program at Austin. Sammy went sneaking around his back and got himself a full ride to Stanford, and not for pre-med.”

It wasn’t the whole story, not by a long shot, and Bobby seemed to get that. “Okay. And?”

“And Dad kicked him out. If he wasn’t going to be part of the family, the family business, the family mission, then he didn’t get to be part of the rest of the family either.” Dean closed his eyes.

“Did you try to stop your father?” Bobby pressed.

“What? No! I mean, that was Dad’s whole…his whole thing. His whole reason for living, after Mom died. And she died protecting Sam, and there was Sam just…just crapping all over it. Crapping all over her. No, I didn’t try to stop Dad. His decision was final and he was right.” He could still hear the sound of Sammy’s feet walking away, echoing on the concrete with the one duffel slung over his back. “I couldn’t have gone against him even if I’d wanted to. It was Dad.”

Bobby sighed. “And did you know about your brother’s… alternative lifestyle?”

Dean grimaced. _Dean, I think I like boys. I mean, I like girls too. But I’m pretty sure I like boys._

 _Are you sure, Sammy?_ The kid had been all of eleven, maybe. 

He’d nodded, miserably. Dean had just chuckled lowly. _How do you know? Have you ever kissed a girl?_ Sammy had shaken his head – no, he hadn’t. _Well, why don’t we try this? I’ll kiss you – I’m a boy, right? I’ll kiss you, and you tell me if you like it. That way you’ll know._

Sammy had given him a dubious look, hair too long even then. _Dean, come on. We’re brothers._

_Exactly, Sammy. That’s why it doesn’t count for anything. We’re brothers, I’m just helping you out. Helping you figure out what you want. It’s normal._

“Yeah, Bobby,” he admitted. “I knew. I knew since he was about eleven.”

“Alright.” He’d never heard his mentor sound so incredibly old. “Well, hopefully someone will talk some sense into him and he’ll be willing to settle out of court. I don’t care how messed up a guy is; no one wants their brother’s career destroyed like that. I’m sure it wouldn’t do his any favors either, you know?”

“Right.” He swallowed. “What time are we meeting with Naomi?”

“Eight. You be there, Dean. And you be contrite.” 

Dean was there, and he was contrite. Fortunately the hospital really never had known a day’s worth of trouble from him, so the lawyers were willing to take his word that there wouldn’t be any further problems of a homophobic variety. “We really feel,” Bobby told him gently, “that it would be for the best if you made some overtures toward Agent Winchester."

Dean almost choked on his water. “Excuse me?”

The head of the legal department was Naomi Tapping. She terrified Dean. Maybe it was the way she never lost that artificial half-smile, kind of like a Barbie doll. “We believe that part of the reason for his…resentment…is the extremely rude treatment he received after the discovery that you had treated your brother. Perhaps if you make an attempt to treat him like a patient he’ll be more likely to accept a settlement and not pursue litigation.”

Damn it. Dean knew that he’d freaked, he knew that part was wrong, but he wasn’t the bad guy here. “Alright. I’ll see what I can do. But I’m telling you, Sammy’ll do what Sammy wants to do. Nothing I’ve said or done has ever changed his mind.”

He went back to his office, not really feeling up to going back to his empty house right now, and reached out to Benny. Benny was still angry, but agreed to being treated to the “nicest steak dinner you’ve ever seen, Winchester. You freaking owe me that much.” 

Dean did owe him that much. He dropped off a bottle of the best whiskey he had in his collection besides.

He had Ben that weekend. It was nice to lose himself in being a dad for a few days. As promised, they went apple picking. They baked pies, and cobblers and strudels and a brown betty. They played catch. They watched the entire Indiana Jones trilogy. Ben wanted to watch Star Wars but Dean couldn’t do that quite yet. Maybe when he’d adjusted to the sudden reappearance of Sam in his life, or maybe when Sam went back to wherever he lived full-time.

On Monday he dropped Ben off at the British International School and made his way to work, settling in early to start on the process of “making overtures” to the brother who had abandoned him. He could do this. He talked to Benny first. 

Benny confirmed that Sam and his “partner” – whatever that meant – Meg had overheard their conversation. Well that was just great; it meant that Dean wouldn’t be able to lie his way out of this, no matter what. Still, he could be professional. Right? Especially if it was temporary. Sam was only in town for a little while, for a short period of time. Dean had gotten very attached to the idea that Sam’s residence in Boston was temporary, only related to the case. 

Benny wasn’t so sure. “Hospital records show an actual address in Arlington,” he pointed out. “Like a real home out in the burbs.”

Dean waved a hand. “I’m sure it’s a corporate apartment, or temporary housing for agents on long-term assignment or something. There’s no way he’d move to the same city where I live.”

“Mmm-hmm. And in all these years did you ever think to check up on your little brother, brother?” Benny sat back and rested his hand in his chin.

“Well, no. But that’s me. It wasn’t on me to check up on him. I wasn’t disowned.” He beamed.

Benny blinked. “I should record you, so that you can go back and listen to yourself like two days later.” 

“I’m telling you, Benny. I mean, I’m the head of trauma.” 

“And I can see why! You traumatized me, you traumatized him, I’m pretty sure you traumatized that other agent –”

“No one’s traumatizing her, Benny. That woman sprinkles trauma on other people’s corn flakes.” And what, exactly, was she doing with Sam?

“Okay,” Benny admitted after half a second. “You have a point there. She sure as hell sprinkled some on mine, which is totally your fault by the way. But that’s not the point. The point is that there’s no reason to think that Sam would have checked up on your whereabouts after you cast him out anymore than you checked on his after you cast him out, you feel me?”

“Hey, I didn’t cast him out. Dad cast him out.”

Benny made him sit in silence for a good two minutes to appreciate the absurdity of that statement. Then he spoke. “Try not to bring that up when you speak to him. Try and stay professional, would you?” 

Dean sighed and dialed the phone. The landline went straight to voicemail, which couldn’t be right. “He wouldn’t have gone back to work, would he?” he asked.

“He’s your brother,” the psychiatrist pointed out, rifling through Dean’s inbox. 

“Like that means anything,” Dean muttered, looking through the hospital records. “Let’s see. We’ve got a cell phone. Should we try that?”

“Let your fingers do the walking, brother,” Benny urged.

Dean dialed the cell phone. This time someone did pick up, and it was a male. “Agent Winchester,” the gruff, tense voice greeted. Well of course his voice is tense, jackass, he told himself. He’s got a gunshot wound to the arm. Still, it didn’t sound like Sam. It was deep, and it was rough, and it carried a hell of a lot more than thirteen years with it.

“Agent Winchester,” Dean greeted, clearing his throat. “I’m calling from Boston General Hospital. We’d like for you to come in for a post-surgical evaluation and talk to a physical therapist –”

“Is this some kind of joke?” Sam’s voice shook with rage. “What the actual ever loving fuck? I can’t even get a surgeon to look at the injury but you think I’m going to brave Boston traffic for the privilege of having a therapist at your hospital poke at me? Good luck, Dean.” The phone went dead. 

Dean looked at Benny. Benny looked at Dean. “Well. That went well,” the surgeon declared. 

Sammy hated him. Sammy hated him. He could live with it when Sam just wanted to get away from Dad and Dad’s strictures – he’d resented it, he’d hated it, it had destroyed him, but he could live with it. He could live with it because it hadn’t been personal. It had been Dean not being enough to keep Sammy around. This was different. This was Sammy hating Dean personally, and the thought was like poison in his veins.

He tried again, having the actual scheduling department call his brother. The result was the same, with fewer profanities. He asked Benny to call. Benny firmly declined to get in between any more Winchester family drama, “’specially not when your brother’s built like that. Or has that bodyguard with him, brother. I ain’t getting anywhere closer to that hot mess than this chair right here.” 

Benny was probably a smart man. 

Bringing up the “bodyguard,” the beautiful woman with the gun, got Dean thinking, though. Maybe going the “professional” route wasn’t the right way to play this. He tried calling Sam’s cell phone, but he didn’t get very far. Sam answered the phone. “Hello?”

“Sammy, listen –”

“Dean.” That flat tone that Dean hated so much was back, and that was as much as Dean got to hear of his little brother’s voice. 

A new voice took over, or rather a different voice. Dean had heard this one before; it was the “bodyguard.” “This is Special Agent Meg Masters, is this Dr. Dean Winchester?”

“Yes, why are you on my brother’s phone?” He blinked at the naked hostility in the woman’s tone. 

“Because you’re harassing my partner, dumbass,” she retorted. “You need to cease and desist. Stop calling him. Stop having your people call him. Stop contacting him. Leave him alone. He didn’t come to Boston looking for you, looking to ‘reconnect’ or any crap like that. You made your needs abundantly clear –”

“Oh did I?” Dean erupted.

“Yeah, you did, when you denied him the most routine level of care that would be offered to the worst kind of felon. Leave him alone, Dr. Winchester, or we’ll be forced to press charges.” 

Boy, Benny hadn’t been kidding when he’d called this woman a bodyguard. “Don’t you think it’s up to Sammy to decide?”

“That’s Special Agent Winchester to you,” she snapped. “Remember that.” The phone went dead.

Dean growled at his handset. “Fuck this,” he said to the room in general, and drove down to the Federal Building. 

The drive should have been enough to clear his head, but downtown Boston traffic isn’t conducive to calming of anyone’s temper and neither is looking for parking near the Federal Building. He presented himself at the field office reception desk using his full height and bulk. “Doctor Dean Winchester, here to see Special Agent Sam Winchester.”

The receptionist wasn’t impressed or intimidated. “Do you have an appointment, Dr. Dean Winchester?” she asked him, spitting out his name in the same tone with which he’d spat out his brother’s full name and title.

“No, but I believe he’s expecting me.” 

“Have a seat. I’ll announce you.”

Dean waited. He waited for five minutes. He shifted seats and he waited for another five minutes. Finally someone came out, but it wasn’t Sammy. The smartly dressed agent was a few years older than the brothers, with short brown hair and an expression on her face that made Dean feel like he’d been caught stealing cookies. “I’m Supervisory Special Agent Jody Mills,” she greeted. She didn’t hold out a hand to shake. “I manage the Boston office and I’m Agent Winchester’s immediate supervisor.”

Dean blinked. “Wait – Sammy’s in the Boston office now?”

She nodded. “He transferred here about a month ago. We’re very fortunate to have him – he’s a valuable agent. He’s fucking brilliant, he speaks ten languages fluently, he’s incredible in a fight and there’s not a better shot on the East Coast.” Her smile was more than a little smug. “More than a few agencies had their eyes on him, but we’re the ones who got him. I’d say you should be proud, but we know that’s not something that happens in the Winchester family.”

Dean crossed his arms over his chest. “Now listen here, lady –”

“No. You listen here. You were told to stop calling, you were informed that your advances were unwelcome, so you drove down here to do what – force yourself on him?” She stepped into his space. “No. Not here, not in my office, not to one of my agents. I get that ‘choice’ was never a big part of Sam’s life growing up but it is now, and after you refused him medical treatment I think he’s right to choose to exclude you now.”

“Okay,” Dean told her, breathing out slowly in an effort to rein in his temper. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, but okay. Even if all that is true you can’t have a guy in his condition back at work already – he was just shot!”

“It’s not the first time for him, and knowing him it won’t be the last.” She offered a wry grin. “We’ve found him a private physician who has taken over his care; his mental health wouldn’t be helped by staring at the ceiling for weeks.”

“No no no no no,” Dean shook his head. “Let him go walk the Freedom Trail or explore the State House or something. Let him go take in a show or watch Netflix, but he can’t be out here running around working full days. His arm will fall off.”

“You don’t get a say, Dr. Winchester. You couldn’t be bothered to care for him when he was your patient, you don’t get to pretend to care now. Get out of our office and don’t come back. If I see you again, or if you attempt to call him again, I’ll arrest you for stalking. Have a nice day.” She returned to the office. 

The hospital offered Sam a hundred grand to not sue. According to Bobby, who spoke with him on the phone, he accepted on the condition that Dean “stop pestering me” and the hospital make the check out to a local organization that helped MOGAI youth. He sounded surprised by the offer, Bobby told him, but took the opportunity when it was presented.

Dean had to admit that he was puzzled. Why wouldn’t he just keep the money? But the ultimate result was the same. As far as the hospital was concerned the affair was over.

Dean’s position was not so clear. He still needed to talk to Sam, try to clear this air between them, but he didn’t know how. “If I go to his office I’ll get arrested, Lisa,” he told her one night after Ben went to bed. He’d decided to fill her in on what had happened, just in case. He didn’t want her to think he was trying to hide anything.

Lisa, as always, was sympathetic but pragmatic. “It’s for the best, Dean,” she pointed out. “It’s not like you parted on good terms in the first place. Maybe it’s better to go your separate ways and just…not have a brother named Sam anymore. I mean, you’ve spent thirteen years not having a brother named Sam; I’m pretty sure Adam’s forgotten he ever existed. Ben doesn’t even know he had an uncle Sam. Maybe just letting it lie is the way to go.”

He sighed. “Part of me thinks you’re right,” he admitted. “Part of me, though, just can’t. I mean, I took care of him, I changed his friggin’ diapers for crying out loud, and he hates me and I have no idea why.” 

“You mean besides the incest?” she pointed out. 

“That was at least as much him as it was me,” he shot back. “At least as much. And yeah, I do mean besides that. We’re still brothers, still…I don’t know. It’s kind of moot anyway, since we’re not exactly likely to run into each other in the supermarket or anything. It just bugs me that he hates me so much.” 

She sighed fondly. “Well, you did kind of shoot any kind of reunion in the foot when you freaked out about having treated him and sent Benny in. Nothing you can do about it now. Maybe someday.” 

“But probably not,” he had to admit.

He went out and picked up a girl that night, just because he could and because he needed to prove something to himself.

As fate had it, however, he was to be offered another chance to reconnect and it was the same Jody Mills who had threatened to arrest him for stalking that inadvertently brought the opportunity to his doorstep. A man accused of an act of terror in Texas had successfully petitioned to get his trial moved to Boston on the grounds that he was unable to get a fair trial in the state where the crime had taken place. Dean certainly couldn’t fault the decision – the guy had killed twenty people and injured sixty more with a homemade fertilizer bomb, no shit he wasn’t going to get a fair trial. Texans weren’t usually big on the whole “live and let live” thing either. They’d probably saved the federal government a billion dollars in security and policing just by moving the trial to Boston.

Of course, that didn’t mean that it wasn’t a circus up here, too. Protestors of all kinds ringed the courthouse and media from all over the world descended on Beantown, cluttering up the streets, falling down and making their way to the emergency rooms of the city. Dean followed the goings on with a little more interest now that he at least peripherally knew some of the players involved, although he never did see a giant in a sling wandering around in the news footage.

Of course all the security in the world can’t necessarily stop a determined individual with a grudge, and one evening about three weeks after Dean’s disastrous reunion with his brother he found himself watching in horror as a lone gunman opened fire on the crowd at the courthouse. The alleged terrorist went down. So did a good ten other people before the camera cut out and Dean’s phone alerted him to the initiation of a lockdown procedure. 

Intellectually he knew that some of the victims would be brought to Boston General, but knowing it was different from living it. He was used to trauma, he was the top trauma surgeon in the state for crying out loud, but mass trauma like that was different from isolated incidents. It always threatened to remind him of the bad old days, of life with Dad. No matter how many fancy toys they had or how clean the OR was, at the end of the day it was still just blood and grime and gore and bones. 

Hell, a day like today was probably the only day that Dad would be proud of him. Of course, that was contingent on him actually saving someone instead of sitting in his office and hoping that the door wouldn’t open into Afghanistan or Chiapas or Georgia or Oromo or whatever fresh Hell their father decided most needed their help. 

He changed and scrubbed in. The hospital was being locked down – all ambulances being re-routed to other facilities, the main doors being locked. Patient surgeries were being rescheduled for other days, Dean had no idea when that would be but many would be put off into the next week if they could wait that long. Visitors were being evacuated. That was an unusual step and it meant that one of the patients being brought in – at least one – was going to be a Very Important Person related to the trial. Maybe they would be the suspect, the shooter. Maybe they would be the defendant. Maybe they would be a key witness, or a judge, or one of the jurors. Either way, the authorities were going the extra mile to make sure that security was as tight as it could be for these patients. 

Dean couldn’t afford to think about that. He couldn’t afford to think about any of the whos or whys. He wasn’t going to be able to get away with letting malpractice insurance cut a check to a charity if he lost his objectivity here, nor should he. 

The first patient brought to him had a gunshot wound to the upper left part of his abdomen. The bullet was still lodged in his gut, but Dean was able to get it out without much trouble. Repairing the damage left behind to the organs and soft tissue – that was going to take time and effort. Fortunately Dean had both time and skill to spare.

Four hours later he finished sewing up the first victim, went back into the scrub room. He changed and washed up for the next victim, who presented with a gunshot wound to the thigh. This one didn’t need as much work; the bullet had lodged in the femur and that was certainly going to cause the victim some problems in the long term, but it had also cauterized the wound to some extent which prevented the kind of bleeding-out that Dean would have expected from such an injury. He cleaned it out and inspected it, then called Ellen in for an ortho consult. They got some screws into the poor soul and got them casted up. They’d walk with a limp, but they’d walk again. 

The procedure had taken another three hours; by this point Dean was certainly feeling the strain. Fortunately there were no more victims for him to treat. He caught a shower and went to go fill in some reports in his office; he liked to do those earlier rather than later while all of the details were fresh in his mind. When he stepped out of the shower and grabbed a towel, though, he found Benny standing before him. “Dean, do you have a few minutes? I’d really like for you to come to my office and talk.”

Dean closed his eyes and rolled his head back, trying to work out some kinks in the stiff muscles. “Benny, it’s been a really long day and a couple of really challenging surgeries. I love you, man, but can it wait?”

“Don’t think you’re going to get an opportunity like this again, brother.” The Cajun shook his head, putting a hand on Dean’s bare shoulder. “I really think you should take the chance and come to my office. Now.” He considered. “Well, maybe you should put some pants on first. They’ve got guns.” 

Understanding dawned. Somehow, Benny had gotten Sam to agree to a meeting. With him. “Shit. Yeah.” He started toweling off as he raced for the locker with his things. “Um. Pants are key. Do I even want to know how you pulled this off?” 

Benny politely looked away while Dean changed. “I had a little chat with the lovely lady by his side –”

Dean looked up. “You mean the bodyguard?”

“You hush. She’s a delicate flower of New England womanhood. She does have certain views on how her partner should be treated, but I figure you and she will get along like a house on fire if you really want what’s best for Sam.” 

Dean tugged his pants on. “If she’s his partner then why are you making heart eyes about her all of a sudden?”

“His work partner, dumbass. They catch bad guys together. Transferred over from Counterterrorism at the same time. She wanted to be closer to her family in Andover and didn’t want to leave him alone; Mills jumped at the chance to have him on the team.” He smiled thinly. “I think Meg might’ve been hoping that he would look to put down some roots and find some stability of his own once he got here, but it’s kind of hard to tell.” 

Dean drew an undershirt over his head. “Wait, so you think she’s got a thing for him?”

“What did I just tell you, Dean? Good Lord, you sound like the jealous ex.”

He looked around the locker room. They seemed to be alone, but you could never be too careful. “I kind of am.” 

Benny frowned. “You’re jealous?”

“Well, no. I mean, not really. I mean, I don’t want Sam back. No, I mean that’s just wrong. I know that now. But it is a little…I don’t know, weird, thinking about him with someone else. I guess it would be for anyone I’d split with under bad circumstances. It’ll pass once I get used to seeing him again, you know?”

“Right. Perfectly normal.” He almost thought Benny was laughing at him, but he could only see sweetness and light in his friend’s face. 

Dean finished dressing as fast as he could and the pair raced toward the psychiatry department. He knew the way to Benny’s office like he knew the way to his own, so he didn’t need the shorter man to lead him anywhere. He threw open the door to Benny’s office and stopped short.

Sam was there. Right there, in the office, sprawled in one of the comfortable guest chairs. He looked tired. It was the first thing Dean noticed about him, the exhaustion plain on his face. Even with the plain fatigue, though, he looked pretty good. His hair touched the pale blue collar of his dress shirt, how the hell was that allowed in the FBI, but he looked good. He needed a shave, too – the stubble highlighted the shadows on his face, made him look like he needed to eat more. He looked at Dean with naked pain on his face as soon as that door opened, and all that Dean wanted to do was to throw his arms around his baby brother and kiss that look right off his face. 

But gentleness didn’t come easily to Dean. It never had, not since the day that their mother had died and Dad had shoved a squalling Sammy into his arms. He simply didn’t know how to express himself softly, especially not where Sammy was concerned. And he noticed, once he tore his eyes away from soul-crushing hazel, was that Sam wasn’t wearing his brace. 

“Where the fuck is your sling, man?” he demanded. 

Sam’s whole face, his whole being transformed. He straightened up, went from rumpled younger sibling to professional FBI agent in less than a second. And that jaw of his, that eternal marker of the shifting moods that made up Sammy’s psyche, set. Benny, who had moved over to his own desk, covered his eyes with his hand and shook his head. Meg’s face went from guarded hope to protective hostility.

“Good seeing you too, Dean.” Sam turned to Meg. “I’ll see you back at the house.” He hauled himself to his feet and started walking toward the door.

“Sammy, wait!” Dean objected, reaching out. “I’m sorry. I’m not good at…you know. I never was. But, I, uh. You should be wearing a sling for at least another week and nowhere near returning to duty. I mean, you were shot.” 

“I’m fine.” 

Meg rolled her eyes. Dean took that for permission. “Look, I know things didn’t go…well. Or right. But I mean, at least take care of yourself, man.” 

“Right. Good talk. I’ll see you around.”

“Sam, stop. Can we just…it’s been thirteen years, man.” Dean put his hand down; clearly no one wanted to grab it. “Can’t we just have a conversation like normal people?” 

Sammy stared at him for a good minute. What was going through that giant head of his? It had been too long; he had no way of knowing now. Of course, maybe he’d never really known. Not if this was what they’d come to. “Fine,” he said, sitting gracefully back down, but only after Meg tugged on his sleeve.


	4. Too Far Below To Turn Around

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam faces some facts about himself.

“Fine,” Sam said, as Meg tugged on his sleeve. He’d figured out what was going on as soon as Meg herded him into Lafitte’s office. She seemed to like the polite Southerner, and to be honest Sam couldn’t think of anything he didn’t like about Lafitte other than his involuntary involvement with Dean cutting him loose again. Until now, that was, with this whole little scheme. He glanced at his partner and switched languages. He didn’t use Farsi, which was a language of intimacy and comfort between them, but Russian. “Was this your idea or the shrink’s?”

She flinched a little bit at his directness. “His,” she admitted. “But I agreed to it. I thought you might…”

“You know this isn’t going to go well,” he pointed out, as Dean sat down and frowned at a conversation in which he could have no part. 

“It could,” she tried. “Think of it as…as ripping off a Band-Aid. And I’m right here with you.” 

He sighed and forced a professional turning-up of his mouth at his brother. Thirteen years and Dean still looked good. Hell, he looked better than good. Dean had always been beautiful and now he was more so. Maturity had finished off some of the features that had been almost too pretty without diminishing those that were sheer perfection. He shouldn’t let himself look, though. He couldn’t think about that. “Alright,” he sighed, switching back to English. “So. How’s things, Dean?” 

Dean swallowed. Maybe Sam should’ve tried harder to modulate his tone. Maybe Sam didn’t have a right to be bitter. He’d known the consequences for disobedience when he left. At the same time, Dean wasn’t the one who’d been trapped like some kind of rabid animal. He found his eyes drawn to the way Dean’s Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed. “They’re. You know. Had a little bit of excitement today, but I guess you wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t, so.”

“True.” The courthouse shooting had been a clusterfuck, but what could they really have done? Sam hadn’t minded moving the Wellington trial out of Texas, that was a fine idea, but Boston was a security nightmare. Everything was jumbled together, everything was accessible from everyplace else if a person just knew how to do it – well, at least the suspect and the defendant had survived. Two jurors, sent to other hospitals, had not been so fortunate. 

“Do you do a lot of that? Providing security?”

“When I need to.” He glanced around himself. “So. Settled job.” 

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m head of the trauma department here. I figure that’s, you know, within the general purview of Dad’s mission.” He smiled a little bit, shaky and weak. “Probably not exactly what he had in mind, but it works. I mean hey, I pulled two bullets out of two guys today, it’s not too different from the old days, right?”

Sam closed his eyes and sighed. If he wanted to, he could remember digging bullets out of his father, with just a penknife and some dental floss. “Yeah,” he rasped. “Not so different at all. Why Boston?” He leaned a little forward. “I’d have thought you’d have gone right out into the field as soon as you had your license. You know. Back Dad up.” 

Dean looked away. “He, uh. He died, must have been May of 2006. You’d have been in your second year of med school.”

“Except I didn’t go to med school.”

“Right.” He lapsed into silence for a moment, eyes dark with something. Probably rage, Sam thought clinically. “Anyway. Dad died in ’06, and I was in my residency. I’d already met Dr. Singer, he knew Dad. That’s how I got the post. But he, uh, he convinced me to stay on and I guess I never left. Turns out the settled life agreed with me more than I thought it would.” Dean and Lafitte shared a chuckle; old friends, clearly.

He expected to be more disturbed by the fact that his father was dead. Maybe he would be later, in the privacy of his room in the townhouse north of the city. Maybe not. If his reunion with Dean had been a disaster how much worse would a reunion with Dad have gone? Maybe John would have shot him and gotten it over with. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said instead, the words spilling out on autopilot from the typical FBI script. “I know how close you were.” 

Dean’s eyes bulged. “Damn it, Sam, he was our father! ‘Sorry for your loss,’ like I’m some kind of patient.”

Lafitte cleared his throat. “Dean, I don’t think it’s exactly carrying tales out of school to say that your father and Sam didn’t enjoy the same kind of relationship that you and your father enjoyed. Plus, your father disowned him more than a decade ago. You have to let Sam feel things in his own way.”

Right, Lafitte was a psychiatrist. “Yeah, but it’s his dad!” Dean shot back. “You’d think that he’d be more affected – I mean, it’s not like he can make it up to the guy now.”

Sam took a deep breath. And of course it was up to him to make it up to John. Of course. He’d taken out a shooter, stopped him from killing any more people, but that wouldn’t have been good enough for John and it wouldn’t be good enough for Dean now. He’d even done it without killing the shooter, shot him in the leg. “I’ve had some time to get used to the idea,” he remarked, forcing his breath to stay even until the red receded from his vision. He made a conscious decision to look away from Dean’s lips. Apparently his anger wasn’t helping to drive those thoughts away. He was weak. He’d always been.

Dean’s fists clenched. If they weren’t with others, subject to the gaze of at least one person that Dean respected, he’d have lashed out. That had always been his way of solving disputes when they’d been younger, to take a swing and knock Sam around, put him in his place. Brothers being brothers, everyone said, and Sam had believed it. That was how boys, how men, solved their problems. “Well,” he exhaled sharply. “I guess we’ll never know then.” He looked out the window. “So. Adam’s in med school now. Third year.”

“Is he? Good for him. Where did he wind up?” Sometimes Sam felt bad about Adam. Sometimes he felt bad about leaving Adam to his fate with John and with Dean, and sometimes he felt bad about not feeling bad about leaving him to his fate. Maybe he should have offered to bring Adam with him, instead of bringing Dean. Who knew what Dean would have subjected him to? After all, when Sam had left Adam had been only a couple of years older than Sam had been when they’d started up.

Had that been why Dean had been so very willing to let Sam go? Because he already had a substitute lined up?

It didn’t matter. There was nothing he could do about it at this point. “BU,” Dean told him, a note of pride in his voice. “He’s doing pretty well, too. Thinks he wants to specialize in pulmonology.”

“Pulmonology. Wow.” He nodded. Dad would be spinning in his grave, if he’d even gotten one, about the idea of his sons specializing in a field of medicine. He’d hate the idea of them working out of a shiny hospital like this, too. Sam might not have been his favorite, not by a long shot, but he was absolutely an expert on the things John Winchester hated. “Good for him. I hope it works out for him.” 

“Me too. He’ll start his residency here, of course. I mean, no need to send him away when he’s got family right here.” Dean smiled, a genuine smile this time. Family was everything to Dean, and Adam of course was still family. Maybe he hadn’t been born of Mary, but he came from sainted John and he’d stayed and toed the line.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” he told Meg, reverting to Farsi. 

“Easy, sugar,” she murmured, putting a hand on his arm.

“Sorry,” Meg smiled with about as much sincerity as a snake-oil salesman, “it’s a habit we fell into when we worked Counterterrorism together. Switch ‘em up. That way someone listening in can’t keep up.” 

“It’s a force of habit,” Sam added dully. Why was he here? Who had decided that this was a good idea again? Literally no one was benefitting from this. “Makes some of the other agents in the office kind of nuts; I guess we’ll fall out of it eventually.” 

“Counterterrorism,” Lafitte observed, raising his eyebrows. “That’s exciting work, isn’t it? I mean, it’s pretty intense. How did you get into that?” 

Meg softened. Sam tried not to scoff, because really Meg? A psychiatrist? “I happened to speak a couple of languages that they thought were useful at the time. Lawboy here spoke a few more. Turns out we worked pretty well together.” 

Dean sniffed. “It doesn’t sound very stable, though. I mean, that’s what it was all about, why you ditched us in the first place, right Sammy? Stability?” 

The smell of Jess’ burning flesh would probably never leave his nostrils. “Yeah, well. Life doesn’t work out the way we want it to sometimes.” 

A silence fell over the room. “So. Is there a Mrs. Sam out there somewhere, coming up from DC maybe?” Dean tried. 

“No.” He still had the ring. They’d managed to get it off of her hand, after the fire. It was just an engagement ring, though – the promise of a future, the hope of future happiness. He kept it in the back of his sock drawer, where he could occasionally brush his fingers against the box if he started accidentally letting himself think that things could change but didn’t have to look at it all the time. 

“Okay. Maybe a Mr. Sam out there?”

“No.” He had to head off the questioning or he was going to shoot someone, possibly himself. “How about you?” He already knew the answer to that one; of course, Dr. Roberts had already spilled the beans. But if it would get him talking about himself instead of Sam it would be welcome. 

“Ah. Yeah, I was married for a while. Nice girl, you’d have liked her. Lisa. It didn’t last, though. You know how it is.” He shook a head, self-deprecatingly. “We, uh, we’re still friendly. Which is good, because – oh. Yeah. You’re an uncle. Uncle Sam, how about that?” Dean beamed and pulled out his phone, searching for pictures.

Sam glowered at Meg, then at Lafitte. “Uncle.”

Dean passed him the phone. The first picture had been taken recently; it looked like, at some kind of apple orchard. The kid was cute, Sam guessed, if kids were your thing. He had dark hair and eyes, but the size of those eyes was entirely Dean. He could absolutely see the resemblance. “That’s your nephew. Ben. Benjamin John Winchester. Smart kid, goes to the British International School.” 

“He has no idea that he has an uncle named Sam, does he?” Sam couldn’t help but ask, handing the phone back.

Dean’s smile faltered a little. “Well, the subject hasn’t exactly come up. You know. I mean, it’s not the kind of thing an eight-year-old can really process, right? ‘So you have this uncle floating around out there, but no one’s seen or heard from him in thirteen years and no one really expects to see or hear from him again.’ It’s not exactly great dinnertime conversation.”

“Probably goes over about as well as ‘Well, you have this uncle floating around out there because the rest of us told him to go away and never come back,’” Sam shot out. Meg’s hand on his arm squeezed a little, but more out of solidarity than warning. At least he hoped so. 

Lafitte cleared his throat. “Is that something you really want to hash out right now, Sam?” He looked from brother to brother.

“Yeah, Sam,” Dean sneered. “Do you really want to go there? Because I’m pretty sure you knew what would happen when you said what you said.”

“Never mind wanting to go there,” Sam growled. “I didn’t want to be here. I let Meg and your psychiatrist railroad me into this because I didn’t want to cause a scene in front of my co-workers. You made your feelings perfectly clear. You made them clear then and you made them clear when you stood outside my goddamn hospital room and refused to even look at my incision because I was too fucking tainted to be near. And that’s fine. It’s…it’s fine. But for the love of all that’s holy just stay the fuck away from me. Respect your own decision. Leave. Me. Alone. 

“I’m not going to bother you. I’m not going to bother your new, clean, good family. And I’m not going to jeopardize your freaking career, all right? I’ve got one of my own to protect and there is no part of anything that happened when we were kids that would be any good for me right now. So you should know that I have zero motivation to come and mess up your life, right? Just…let me go.” He heard himself laugh, a bitter sound even to his own ears. “It shouldn’t be that hard seeing as how you’ve got practice.” 

Dean stood. “You son of a bitch,” he growled. “You’re the one who left.”

“And why do you think that is, Dean?” Sam forced himself to meet his brother’s eyes. 

“Notice how hard it would have been to find me, to stay in touch. You didn’t. You knew where I was going, where I was. I made sure of it. You could’ve found me, given me a call. Wasn’t something you were interested in doing, though, were you, Dean?”

“Dad said –”

Now it was Sam’s turn to rise to his feet. He didn’t use his full size very often, mostly on suspects, but he threw his shoulders back despite the pain in the left and leveled his eyes at his brother. “Yeah. Dad said. And you’ve stood by it for thirteen years. If you gave a shit about me, you’d have reached out then. Not this bullshit posturing you’re doing now.”

“Sam,” Meg interrupted, her cool voice breaking through his fury.

“It’s not posturing, Sam,” Dean cried. “Jesus Christ, is it such a bad thing to want to reconnect with my brother?” His face was twisted by something; maybe he was moved by this whole thing after all.

“There’s nothing to reconnect with,” he told Dean bluntly. “It’s stupid. There’s too much…I mean, your son has no idea that I even exist. You were too ashamed of me, too disgusted by me to tell him that he had another uncle. Dad told you that I was dead to you all, and you all just went with it. You all had each other, I’ve had no one –”

“You’d have had us too if you’d freaking stayed!”

“Yeah. Stayed to be the millstone around Dad’s neck and your pet.” He felt his face turn up. He needed to stop himself now, before he said anything in front of this Lafitte character that couldn’t be unsaid. “Thanks, but I’m pretty sure I made it clear that I wasn’t okay with that.”

“Why not? It was a good life, Sammy!”

“No. No, it wasn’t. And if you think about what you’d want for your own son I hope you’d figure out why.” He loosened his tie. “I’m taking off now. I wish you well, Dean. I really do. Your boy looks like a good kid and I wish for all the best things in life for him. It was…” Now it was his turn to swallow. “It was good to see you. I mean, yeah, we fought. But it was good to actually see you face to face. You look good, man. Healthy. Happy. Life’s been good to you. I’m glad.” 

He turned around and walked out of the office, hearing Dean yelling behind him. Meg raced to catch up to him, but he didn’t slow down to make it easier for her. She was perfectly capable of making it on her own and he was angry. “Sam!” she hissed as he stormed his way toward the stairs. “Sam!” 

She finally caught up with him on the landing on the way down to the parking garage, mostly because she slid down the banister. “I get it,” she told him. “You’re pissed.”

“I’m just…” He blew some of the hair out of his face and rubbed the back of his neck with his good hand. “I’m done, Meg. I’ve had about all I can take, you know? I just…I need to do something. I need to go run, or hit the bag for a while. Maybe go to the range and waste some bullets. But I need to do something or I’m going to explode.” 

Dark eyes looked him over before one corner of her mouth quirked up. “Well, I guess that would make a mess on the carpets. Let’s get to the office, then.” 

Sam drove them back to the office, and they both hit the gym for a while. Dr. Roberts had cleared him for light duty (“only because you’ll do it anyway,”) but that hadn’t included serious workouts like the heavy bag. Sam didn’t care. He needed to hit something. He needed to let his rage out, and he didn’t want to let it out on a suspect or a witness or God forbid on Meg. So he did some cardio, and then he punched the bag until he couldn’t move his arm anymore. Then he kicked the bag for a while, and then he did some more cardio. By the time he was done it was two o’clock in the morning and Meg was dozing quietly on a pile of balance balls in the corner. She groaned when he woke her to go back to the car, but went willingly enough.

He couldn’t move his arm at all the next day. That was good. The pain was good. It distracted him from the thought of Dean.

_“You want this, little brother, don’t you?”_

_“I don’t know, Dean. It’s an awfully big step.”_

_“Look at you. You’re all hard and everything – of course you want it. You’ve liked everything else we’ve done. You know, it won’t be much longer until I go off to college. Then we’ll only be able to do this stuff during the breaks.”_

God, he’d been all of what, fourteen? Thirteen? He couldn’t even remember anymore. Two kids, lonely and isolated. That’s all it had been, that’s all it could ever have been. He’d been a fool, as a child, to have believed in more. _“You and me against the world, Sammy.”_

He was an adult now, and he knew better. He knew fate, and he knew merit, and he knew that it was all his fault, his own fault, that if the insurgents or whatever had just killed him and let Mary live everyone’s life would have been…well, they hadn’t. They hadn’t, and no one’s life had turned out well. At least Dean had made something out of his life, gotten out of that miserable cycle of running and fighting and trying to patch people up and sending them back out to die. 

Meg came to him at lunchtime. “It’s Friday,” she pointed out.

“Astute observation. Did you learn that at Quantico?” he shot back.

She made a face at him. “No. I had to have my dumbass partner show me. Listen. Um, Benny Lafitte invited me to go see Mumford and Sons tomorrow night. I, uh, I’m a little iffy on leaving you alone, but –”

He laughed. “Meg, I know I probably shouldn’t be alone in the kitchen but I promise not to set the house on fire, okay? I won’t even go near the stove. I’ll go to the shop up on Mass Ave and get a salad.” 

“That’s not what I meant,” she huffed. “Are you going to be okay? I mean you’re still hurt and I mean with everything…”

He plastered a smile onto his face. He loved Meg, and she loved him, but he didn’t have the right to ask her to sit around and be his caretaker. He was a grown-ass man. He needed to be able to face up to his own shit. “Meg. You love Mumford and Sons. They’re your favorite. Go. Enjoy. Rock the banjo or whatever. I’ll go for a run or catch up on paperwork. It’ll be fine.” 

A tiny little furrow appeared between her brows. “Sam, it’s Saturday night, you shouldn’t be doing work, you should be out there and having a life too! I can see if we can get tickets –”

“No no no, thanks, no third wheeling for me. I’m too big, it would be like one of those Big Wheels you had when you were a kid. Seriously, Meg. It’s fine. I might catch up on The Good Wife.” 

She bit her lip. “You know, Dr. Roberts called. She was asking about you. Maybe you could give her a call and you and she could go and catch a show, I think she’s into musicals.”

“I’ll give that some thought.” Maybe he would, in the privacy of his own room. 

He did wind up going for a run early the next morning, trying to see if he could outrun the mess in his brain. It usually worked, at least while he was putting one foot in front of the other. Something about exercise usually drove all other thoughts from his mind; that was half the reasons that he’d become such a fitness nut in the first place, to give himself a little bit of peace from the storms raging in his brain. After his run he did some yoga, which had the dual benefit of helping to ground him a little more and helped to loosen his overworked shoulder as well. Once he’d done a little bit of strength training and core work, though, he’d run out of things to do that would let him turn off his brain. 

He could power through this, though. He kept his mind carefully blank while showering, reciting firearms specs to himself as he lathered, rinsed and repeated. He caught up on his paperwork, not that his paperwork was all that far behind. He had discharged his firearm yesterday, so he needed to write up a report on that. Sending the message off at three-thirty on a Saturday afternoon earned him a message from Jody Mills that consisted of two words: “GO OUTSIDE.” 

It was probably meant to be humorous. 

Maybe he should get out more. Maybe he should respond to Dr. Roberts’ overtures. She was pretty, intelligent, not the type to back down from anything at all. On paper, she was everything that Sam wanted in a person. She’d even passed on some running tips and mentioned an interest in yoga. 

At the same time, she was a doctor. How could he even think about a doctor without recognizing that he was kind of, well, pre-conditioned to be attracted to doctors? Especially doctors with wide, beautiful eyes and lush, full lips. And yes, here in the privacy of his own room he could admit that as soon as he saw those eyes, those lips, those hands, those freckles he would have done almost anything to have them all back again. 

He was disgusting. It was wrong, he knew it was wrong. Sure, Meg could sit there and tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that he’d just been a kid. But she hadn’t been there. _“Look at you, all hard for me. Just begging for it, Sammy. Come on, you can take another finger.”_ And God, he had, he had taken everything Dean had offered. He should have been stronger. He should have resisted harder. Why couldn’t he have just said “no” to Dean, or said it more forcefully to make Dean believe it. 

He’d have done anything for his big brother. Anything to prove his affection, anything to prove his devotion. Back then Dean had hung the moon, the stars and the sun, too. Adam hadn’t even come into their lives yet, he’d been born but his mother was still involved and out there and he was safe and in the States somewhere. It was just Sam and Dean, and they’d been huddled in a hut somewhere in Chiapas in the middle of an uprising. Their father had gone deeper into the countryside to find fighters to help – “People are dying, boys” – and it had just been the two of them in a one room hut with a few guns and some beans and rice until Dad got around to getting back. If he got around to getting back.

He’d known then that it wasn’t right, but he’d wanted Dean’s love and approval so much he hadn’t fought as hard as he should have. And as he got older – well, between all of the moving around and paranoia, it wasn’t like he had a lot of other outlets for his, er, urges. He hadn’t wanted it, not to begin with, but he’d accepted it and come to welcome it.

Which had been the beginning of the end, of course. He’d entered high school at the same time that Dean entered college. Dean got to go to college back in the States. It was a school picked by Dad, of course, with classes chosen by Dad, but it was still one school, in a single dorm for the whole year. And, well, it had been different for him. “It’s not like I can tell them I’ve got a guy back home, Sammy,” Dean had told him, when he’d asked him point blank. “Come on, be serious.”

Be serious. Sam couldn’t ever be “serious.” Not for Dean, because they were brothers. He was a way to kill time, a way to satisfy urges because you couldn’t just go out and pick up people in rural Sudan. They frowned on that there. But college was just full of pretty girls who would be more than happy to give a guy the casual roll in the hay that their father’s mandate required, especially a guy like Dean. No little brothers required. 

He’d started then, because he knew that he didn’t want to be a doctor, shouldn’t be a doctor. He’d started planning and scrimping and looking for his ways to get out. Maybe Dean would come with him. He’d had some kind of fantasy, where Dean said, “Yes. Instead of returning to the War-Zone-Of-The Month I’ll come out to California, we’ll get an apartment, domestic bliss will be ours,” and somehow he’d let it get built up in his mind so that it actually seemed realistic, but he knew better.

Now, looking back as a man instead of a boy, he could only shake his head. He could never be good enough for Dean. He’d somehow turned Dean from a normal, healthy brother into…well, into a guy who felt compelled to touch his little brother. However Sam might have felt, it had been different for Dean and Sam should just be happy that his brother had been able to move on and have a healthy, happy and normal life.

And it wasn’t like he could blame their family, or Dean, for his life. His life wasn’t even bad. He had a good job that meant something. He had the respect of his colleagues. He had access to a training facility where he could go to work off excess energy. The job was interesting enough, consuming enough that he could throw himself into it and not really mind the fact that he’d never done anything else. 

Who was he kidding? He wasn’t going to call Dr. Roberts. He wasn’t going to go find one of the bars that catered to men seeking men, either. He’d never been one for just a physical hookup, less so since getting back from Georgia, and even if Cara or Random Guy #12 from the bar turned out to be looking for something more long-term than one night they’d take one look at the scars on his body and run screaming. Or laughing. That was before they had to deal with the mess that was his brain. 

He turned out the light early and pulled the covers up. He heard Meg and Lafitte return to the house and pretended to be asleep, but sleep was a long time in coming. 

He went for a run the next morning, as he usually did. When he returned home, drenched in sweat and a panting mess, he found Benny Lafitte sitting at his kitchen table with two mugs of coffee. Sam raised an eyebrow. “Where’s Meg?” he asked.

“Sleepin’,” the Southerner drawled. “It’s kinda early for her, apparently. I heard you leave and had a hard time getting back to sleep, so she said I could make you some coffee.” He gestured to the steaming mug that wasn’t in front of him. “Go on, have a seat.” 

Part of him bristled at being “invited” to have a seat at his own kitchen table, but he knew better. It was Meg’s kitchen table, really. He’d slink out once she found someone that she wanted moving in with her, let her buy him out or maybe not even say anything about it. Maybe he could get a place a little further out, farther away from wherever it was that Dean lived. “Thanks,” he said shortly, taking the chair. Then, recognizing that he’d been ruder than the situation called for, “How was the show?”

“Oh, Mumford and Sons was awesome. Taking the T there and back was an adventure. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried to do that. We parked at Alewife and took the Red Line downtown.” Sam nodded. Intellectually he understood, he’d memorized the transit map in case they had a situation with the Wellington trial that required it, but he’d never bothered to use it yet. “How was your night, Sam?”

“Peachy. Caught up on my shows, the whole nine.” He wrapped his hands around the mug. They’d gotten extra-large mugs, just so that he wouldn’t feel like a freak with doll-sized mugs. 

“Mmm-hmm. Sam, I wanted to apologize for Thursday.” Sam froze. “Dean’s a good friend of mine, and I know that he’d been trying to reach out ever since that disaster outside your room. I thought that might be a good way to bring the two of you together.” He sipped from his coffee. “It seemed to have been distressing to you, and I’m sorry for that.”

Sam looked down for a second, but he wasn’t going to show weakness in front of this friend of Dean’s. “Did you…did you take Meg on a date just to talk to me about Dean?”

Benny blinked. “You’re an awfully paranoid son of a gun, ain’t you? I ain’t surprised, considering the situations your daddy put you in. I’ve had occasion to talk to Dean. I’ve talked to Dean about a lot of things, Sam, and I’m not here to pass judgment. But no – I asked Meg out because she’s a gorgeous, impressive woman and if I didn’t ask her out she wouldn’t have the chance to see all the reasons why she should say yes.” He smiled slowly, like a cat with a bowl of cream. 

Sam took a deep breath. “If you’ve talked to Dean about ‘a lot of things’ then why would you ever think that getting the two of us into the same room again would be a good idea?” There were so many other things he could ask, so many other topics he wanted to bring up, but he kept his focus on this one. “I…unless he’s outright lying you’d have to know that it would go poorly, man.” 

Behind the mug, a little smile played around Benny’s lips. “Part of my job is healing families.” 

“Dean has a family. It doesn’t sound like they’re doing too badly.” His hands clenched around his own cup and he thought he might break it, so he put them on the table slowly and calmly. 

Benny watched him with bright, alert eyes. “You don’t count yourself among them?”

Sam huffed out a little laugh. “No.” Maybe if he changed his name it would get the point across. Of course, the matter of whom he might be trying to convince was still up for debate. 

“Do you want to?”

“The hell kind of a question is that sitting in another man’s kitchen before his coffee’s even cool enough to drink?” Sam snapped. “You’re not my psychiatrist, you’re not my therapist, and you’re Dean’s friend not mine. I’m sorry you got dragged into all this crap, I am, but it’s really not your business.” 

The bearded man held up his hands. “My apologies. I’m not trying to act as any kind of medical professional right now. I’m just trying to…trying to help. You said some things when we met up that made me kind of concerned.” 

“Right. There’s no need to be concerned.”

“You brought up an idea a few times, Sam. You talked about the idea of being somehow tainted, or that Dean had a ‘new, clean’ family. That’s not a healthy way of thinking. Have you talked to someone about that?”

Sam closed his eyes and counted to ten. “I’m not going to talk to my brother’s friend about that,” he pointed out. “Or to my best friend’s boyfriend.” 

“Valid.” He wrote a name and number on a piece of paper. “But you should talk to someone, Sam. Lana here is a colleague of mine, but she doesn’t work at Boston General. She’s in private practice. She’s a therapist and she’s worked with a lot of adults who’ve had…unconventional childhoods.” 

Sam’s stomach roiled. “Thanks, Benny. I’ll think about giving her a call.” He stood up. “Excuse me.” He retreated to his room, coffee untouched on the table. 


	5. Now What I'm Saying Is Nothing New

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam meets Ben. The world doesn't collapse in on itself.

Dean called Sam on Tuesday. Sam didn’t pick up. 

On the one hand, their little meeting hadn’t gone well. Dean hadn’t exactly had high hopes for it. He hadn’t had hopes at all. He’d been looking to get clean and get home, and that had been it. He’d been surprised by the opportunity and then greeted with hostility and resentment. 

At the same time, Sam had been…well, Sam had been railroaded into being there in the first place, which hurt. He shouldn’t have to depend on other people tricking him to see the brother that had been his entire world for eighteen years. But to hear some of the things coming out of Sam’s mouth – that had been shattering. He blamed Dean for the separation. He was angry – angry! – that Ben didn’t know about him. 

But the way that Sam seemed to see himself, the way he talked about himself during that little outburst – Dean could have dealt with all the crap about the separation. That had been Sam’s fault and if he didn’t know it then he’d taken too many hits to the head. The rules were simple, in those days – you did what you were told and you shut up about it. And he couldn’t blame Dean for Ben’s ignorance, it wasn’t like there had been an Uncle Sam for Dean to show him.

Or like he could explain what had really been going on between Sam and Dean.

But all of that other stuff was just too much. That Dean had been too disgusted by him to look at the incision? Was that really his takeaway? He’d been too upset, not too disgusted. After the way he couldn’t keep his hands off Sammy, the way he couldn’t stand to see someone else with their hands on Sammy for crying out loud, how could he possibly believe that he would ever disgust Dean? See himself as tainted? Think that Dean’s new family was somehow cleaner and purer than the brother he’d once loved more than life itself?

On Wednesday he dropped in at Benny’s office. His friend rolled his eyes to Heaven. “Somehow I knew you’d be here. Kept my calendar open,” the Cajun drawled, putting his feet up on the desk. 

“So did you get anywhere with his pit bull?” Dean grinned, flopping down into the chair that Sam had occupied almost a week ago.

“A gentleman doesn’t share stories, Dean,” Benny chastised with a reproving frown. “Maybe that’s why none of your relationships lasts more than a few dates. But I did take the beautiful and universally charming Agent Masters to the Mumford and Sons concert last Saturday, and I am having dinner with her this evening. She is taking me to this place up in Arlington, on Mass Ave.” He smiled beatifically. “The woman is something special, Dean.”

“You’ve got it bad, old man,” he chuckled. “Who’d have thought it?”

A blush settled over his old friend’s cheeks. “And what if I do? Not all of us are suited to the bachelor lifestyle. I mean, it’s early yet. Her job could call her away, or we could just turn out to be incompatible. Who knows? But…I mean, I do enjoy her company.” 

“That’s nice, Benny. I’m happy for you.” 

“Thank you, Dean. Now why don’t you get to why you’re really here.” His friend grinned. 

“That obvious?”

“I can read you like a book, brother, and don’t you forget it.”

“I’m worried about Sam,” he admitted. “It’s like, before, when I hadn’t even really seen him, sure, I was trying to reach out but that was because I had to. It was my job, it was something I was supposed to do. Then, on Thursday, I actually saw him, awake and kind of healthy and everything –”

Benny raised an eyebrow. “’Kind of’ healthy? Dean, the guy’s running five to ten miles a day!”

“His ‘private doctor’ should be sued for malpractice then, because he shouldn’t even have the damn sling off much less be going for a run like that,” he told the other man, leaning forward. “I mean that part’s my own fault, because I freaked out and didn’t sit there and tell him how to take care of himself, but you’d think that this other doctor could read a damn chart.” 

“Do you think he’d listen?”

Dean rubbed his face with his hands. “I guess there’s no reason he’d start now. But…I mean, did he seem okay to you?”

“There ain’t nothing about that boy that seems okay to me, Dean. Not sure what you think you’re going to do about it, though.” Benny raised his eyebrows and leaned back further in his chair.

Dean sat back and shook his head. “Excuse me?”

“Dean, you’re hostile and judgmental. You blame him for breaking up your family even though your family melded seamlessly behind him when he left, and you didn’t make any effort to reach out to him until the hospital ordered you to. You’re angry that he left an incestuous and abusive situation –”

“I never hurt Sammy!” Dean yelled. He lowered his voice. “He wanted everything we did.”

“Be that as it may,” Benny placated, holding out his hands, “the situations your father forced all three of you into were abusive and the fact that you demanded fidelity from him without being willing to give it in return was abusive too. You have to understand that, Dean. I, uh, I’ve got to admit that I’ve got some concerns about him myself.”

Dean looked up sharply. “What kind of concerns?”

“I’m concerned about his general well-being, his mental and emotional health. I had the chance to talk to him a little bit on Sunday morning –”

Even in the middle of such a painful discussion Dean could be happy for Benny. “You sly dog!” he congratulated.

“-And while he told me essentially nothing he told me enough to make me a little anxious on his behalf. I gave him a referral to a therapist, but I have no reason to suspect that he did anything other than throw the thing away.” Benny grinned wryly. “Have you tried to call him? Since Thursday, I mean?”

“Once. Yesterday. Straight to voicemail. I mean, I get that he’s busy, not that I have the first clue doing what.” He shook his head. “You know, he didn’t tell me the first goddamn thing about himself when you got us together on Thursday.”

Benny considered, head off to the side. “Well, he told you he’s not married.”

God help him, but that actually made Dean feel better. “But I don’t know…I don’t know if he’s seeing anyone, what he does for fun anymore.”

“According to Meg, he works for fun. Says he hasn’t left the house for social reasons since the Bureau lent him out to ‘an agency to be named later’ for a few months. No one knows what happened, because he’s not telling, but he had about a month of medical leave and now?”

Dean cringed. “Aw, come on. He’s got to have some way of…I don’t know. Nothing? Seriously?”

“Not a bit.”

“He can’t be blaming that on me too,” Dean said without thinking.

Benny paused. “I’m guessing not. But he’s hurting, that much I’m sure of. He needs support. Do you want to be one of the people providing it?”

Dean paused. “I mean. Yeah. Of course. He’s my brother and if he needs help I’m going to help him. If he’ll let me; he’d kind of have to take my calls.”

Benny smiled. “Well, as it happens Meg and I have a plan for that. It just so happens to coincide with seeing more of each other, but we have a plan for that. How do you feel about letting Sam and Ben meet?”

Dean froze. That was a bad idea. His first instinct was that Ben had to be protected from Sammy, that all of the darkness and disobedience and anger and…just everything about Sam needed to be carefully kept away from his son to keep the boy pure. “I don’t think I like that much,” he admitted. “I don’t think Lisa’s going to like that much. Why do you think that would be a good idea?”

“Sam doesn’t see himself as part of your ‘clean and pure’ new family. I think that you need to show him, not just tell him, that he can be a part of your family. That you want your new life to include him. It’ll probably take several tries, I can’t remember the last patient I saw with such ingrained self-hatred, but it’s tangible proof to him that he’s not alone, that he has a family.” 

Dean sighed. “Lisa’s going to flip her lid, man.”

“Lisa doesn’t even know Sam.”

“No, but she knows what we did. She knows…”

“Well, you’re over that now, aren’t you, cher? You only did that because you were isolated, kept away from normal, healthy sexual development. Now that you’re a grown man and you’ve figured out for yourself who you’re supposed to be devoting your attention to you’re not even remotely going to be tempted by Sam.”

“Yeah. No, of course not.” He got the words out strongly, believably. He had no idea how, because behind his eyes all he could imagine was those pink lips wrapped around his cock. “No, I’d never want that again. It was sick; I’m repulsed by it. That’s probably why I reacted so strongly when I saw Sam.” 

Benny gave him a gentle smile and patted his hand. “No need to fret, brother. It’s not your fault. You were kept away from anything normal or natural. But you’re both older now; you’re both going to do better. I’ll talk to Lisa about it.”

Better Benny than Dean. She eventually agreed, although, “It was a battle, brother, let me tell you.” It was left to Meg to convince Sam that this was a good idea, and Benny kept Dean updated with a series of running texts that would have made for hilarious daytime entertainment had it been someone else’s life. Sam had always been good at excuses and evasions, and the ones he gave on Thursday ran something like this:

1) I don’t do kids, Meg. You know this.

2) What is this, some kind of very awkward triple date? Should I go to the nursing home and pick up an octogenarian to level the playing field?

3) At least you’re announcing your ambush ahead of time this time, also no.

4) That won’t be fun for the kid, Meg, come on, think of him.

5) I’m washing my hair.

6) I’m running off to Afghanistan to teach English.

7) I’m painting my room. Yes, rose pink, why not.

8) I’m paying a local crime boss to do something shady so I can go arrest him that night.

9) I can’t repeat what he just said on a work phone but trust me it was nasty. You’d have a field day with it, Benny.

10) No, I don’t want to, and you can’t make me.

Ultimately, though, by the beginning of the day on Friday they’d set up a meeting place and time for Saturday night. Dean even made reservations at an Italian place not too far from his house. Sam sat with Meg and Benny at a table in the back; they waved when they saw Dean. Sam froze when he saw Ben, but Dean figured he could forgive that a little bit. It wasn’t every day that you met your eight-year-old nephew for the first time. 

“Sam, this is my son, Ben. Ben, this is my brother, your Uncle Sam.” He rolled his eyes as Sam held out a gigantic paw for the kid to shake, like he was an adult or something.

Ben frowned. “I thought Uncle Adam was your brother,” he accused Dean.

Sam forced a smile. “Oh, he is. But a long time ago, I did something that the family wasn’t so proud of. So I wasn’t allowed to be in the family anymore.”

Dean closed his eyes and winced as Ben gasped. “It must have been something pretty bad. Family is everything to Dad.”

“I suppose it was, to him. But it’s not something you ever have to worry about, okay, Ben?”

He looked at Sam, whose eyes flitted from Benny to Meg in a fruitless search for help. “Okay. What kind of a doctor are you, anyway? Do you only work on giants?”

“Ben,” Dean warned, blushing.

Meg snickered. “Your Uncle Sam isn’t a doctor, kiddo. He’s an FBI agent. He’s a very, very good one, too.”

Ben’s eyes were the size of saucers now. “But I thought everyone in the family had to be a doctor!”

Dean cleared his throat. “So. Dinner.” 

Meg and Benny gave him disapproving looks, but Dean couldn’t be bothered by that. Here they were trying to subvert the whole fabric of the family right off the bat! It was the whole reasons that Sam had needed to be cut out completely. What if that kind of poison had infected Adam, then where would they be? And it wasn’t like Sammy was objecting to the change. He just smiled that thin little smile and turned to his nephew. “So. Ben. Do you come here often?”

He considered. “Kind of,” he supposed. “On special occasions, sometimes. When Mom and Matt got engaged Dad took us all to dinner here. Have you ever been here before?”

“No, no, Meg and I just moved her a little while ago. We came up from Washington, DC, and now we live in Arlington.” He laughed a little. “So, Ben, I don’t really know what’s good to eat here. I like a lot of vegetables and a lot of beans. Can you tell me what’s on the menu that I’d like?”

Ben made a face. “Vegetables are gross, Uncle Sam. I like meatballs. But I guess you grew pretty big and strong…”

Dean chuckled, letting himself look at his brother for a moment. “That he did! Maybe you’ll think about eating your vegetables?”

The boy made a face. “Maybe. They’re still gross, though. And beans make you fart!”

“Ben, we’ve talked about bathroom words at the table!” Dean frowned.

Sam leaned in conspiratorially. “I’ll tell you a secret, Ben. That’s the FBI’s secret weapon.” 

Ben lost himself in helpless giggles, and Dean knew then and there that the kid was hooked. Sammy might say he “didn’t do kids,” but he’d wrapped Dean’s son right around his finger just as easily as if he’d cast some sort of spell. Part of Dean basked in the knowledge; Sam could do this, they could do this, together. Having Sam back in his life didn’t have to be a horror show.

Part of him kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Ben wasn’t stupid. He noticed all of the weird little nuances about Uncle Sam. He’d picked up on the “not a doctor” thing right away. He noticed that his uncle didn’t eat much of his dinner either, just moved things around on his plate so it looked like he was keeping up. “You’re not going to get to eat dessert if you don’t eat your dinner,” he whispered to the outsider. 

Meg lost it. “I keep telling him that, but he doesn’t like dessert so it doesn’t get me anywhere.” 

When they got home later that night Dean found out how much more his son had noticed. He’d noticed how his uncle startled every time someone in the restaurant dropped a glass, how he didn’t talk much about himself. And he noticed how Dean didn’t look much at Uncle Sam. “Don’t you think he’s pretty?” the boy asked.

“Men are handsome,” Dean corrected automatically. “Not pretty, as a general rule.” Oh, but Sammy was pretty. So very, very pretty. 

“Okay. Do you think he’ll come to my soccer game on Thursday?”

“I don’t know. I can ask. I know he’s awfully busy doing FBI stuff, sometimes he gets called out to do things at the last minute and he can’t do the things he wants to do.” 

He called Sam, and then he called Sam again when Sam didn’t return his call. “Look, I know you’re busy, man, but Ben has a game on Thursday night and he asked if you’d be there. It would mean a lot to him if you could make it,” he told his brother when Sam finally picked up.

“You want me. At your son’s game.” Sam made a scoffing noise. “Really.” 

“Hey, it’s Ben. What can I say; you made a pretty powerful first impression. You always did, I guess. But he’s pretty well convinced that you’re the Second Coming or something, and he wants you there. What do you say?”

“I don’t know, Dean, I mean – you can’t be comfortable with this.”

Dean shifted. He wasn’t comfortable with it, but he needed to be. “I’m getting there, Sammy. I’m getting there. We need to get used to each other again.”

“Do we?” He sighed. “What time and where? If I’m able, I’ll show. No promises.”

Sam made it. Lisa eyed him with the kind of protective eye that came from years of fear. Sam smiled politely, didn’t show offense when she didn’t shake his hand, and stood off to the side. He showed no recognition of Adam, nor did Adam acknowledge him. “He’s your brother, Adam,” Dean hissed.

“Not since I was twelve or so,” Adam growled back. “Dad said so, remember? I’m surprised at you, letting him show his face.” 

“There’s other stuff going on, Adam. I just…I think it’s time to let him come home. Don’t you?” He sighed.

“He lost that option, Dean. I mean, do what you want, but I don’t have to welcome him.” Dean couldn’t fault him for the sentiment. He’d felt the same way when Sam had first shown up, or tried to. Still, he couldn’t help but be disappointed.

Sam helped Ben right in the middle of the game, giving him some pointers while he was on the sidelines that got him two goals in the second half. Even Lisa was slowly won over by the end of the game, but Sam still slunk off when the game was over, not coming out for dinner with the rest of them. He still hadn’t volunteered anything; he’d devoted himself entirely to Ben and left again. 

Benny approved of Dean’s attempts and thought that Sam’s openness to Ben was probably a good sign, but he thought that other tactics might be necessary. He arranged for a meeting between Meg and Dean. “I ain’t getting’ involved here,” he promised. “I just think you’re the people who Sam cares about the most, and who are the most likely to be able to have an effect on Sam’s behavior.”

Dean frowned. “What do you mean ‘on Sam’s behavior?’ What’s he doing?” They were at a bar in Cambridge, someplace relatively neutral. 

Meg glared at him. “What, you thought going to a soccer game and suddenly ‘Poof! Little Sammy’s all better again?’” She shook her head. “People don’t work that way, Dean.”

He frowned at her. “People keep telling me that something’s wrong with him, but he seems to be doing okay from what I can see. Every time I talk to one of you G-men you keep telling me how proud I should be of him, how impressive he is. Sounds like his career is doing just fine. He’s hot as hell, so if he’s not with anyone it’s by his own damn choice and by the way, don’t you think it’s a little early to expect him to have found his true lifetime love after he just moved to Boston?” He picked up his beer and drank from it, savoring the hoppy flavor. “He must be making decent money as a Fed if he can afford to turn up his nose at a hundred thousand dollar settlement that he basically bullied out of the hospital.”

“He had nothing to do with that,” Meg told him icily. “He just wanted to walk away.” 

Dean just about choked on his beer. “Excuse me?”

“Yeah. Jody called up the hospital when she heard how you treated him – she doesn’t know what went on between the two of you, but she knows he’s bi. Knows you knew he was bi when he got kicked out and drew her own conclusions. I wouldn’t let him call her off. Figured it was better than the truth, and you deserved anything you got for everything you said and everything you did.” Her tiny chin stuck out. “Donating the money was his idea.” 

Dean sat back. “I thought he hated me.” He shook his head, turned his glass around in his hand. “I…why did he keep refusing my calls?”

“Because you treated him like he was some kind of toxin, some kind of infectious blanket!” she snapped. “You still are, like he’s going to somehow turn your son into a pervert or some kind of a monster. Every time I’ve seen you two together you can’t bring yourself to go near him but you’re watching him like a hawk.”

“He needs watching, Meg,” Dean told her, moistening his lips. “I don’t know what he told you about what went on between us but believe you me, I was not the one to blame there.”

Benny cleared his throat. “I think you’re getting a little off-topic here,” he suggested. “It’s less important to talk about who is responsible for you and Sam in the past than it is to talk about Sam now.” Benny’s glare was full of recrimination, and Dean leaned back in his chair. “Meg, Dean isn’t aware of Sam’s symptoms. He doesn’t see much of Sam. I know you don’t really get to see it, but Dean is trying to reach out to Sam. He’s walking a fine line between wanting to help and getting accused of stalking. Let’s try to help him figure out where the boundary is.”

Meg rolled her dark eyes and sighed. “He’s not eating. He’s not eating, he’s not sleeping and he’s not interacting. It used to be we’d get out of work and we could chill on the couch, watch a movie or a show while we ate dinner. Now he just shuts himself away in his room. We see each other on the way to and from work, or at work. And that’s not like him.”

Dean sighed. “He always got jealous when I had a new girlfriend,” he pointed out. “You think it’s maybe…you know. Benny?”

“No. I don’t.” She turned to face her boyfriend. “Are you positive that this is a good idea, hon? Because I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“You need someone’s help with him, sugar,” Benny told her.

“Why don’t you think it’s jealousy?” Dean challenged, leaning forward. “He’s used to being the only person you had to take care of. Now you’ve got another man in your life –”

“Because Sam and I weren’t ever like that,” she snapped. “It’s a bad idea, with your work partner. And because Sam’s encouraged me to go after other men. He’s never shown the slightest bit of jealousy before, not with me or with any of the people he’s dated. So you can fuck right off. He hasn’t just been sitting around and pining after you. You know, I don’t understand how little respect you’ve got for the man. I’m worried about him, Dean. He’s not well.”

Dean rubbed his hands through his hair. “What do you want from me, Meg?”

“I want to know what exactly you mean to do with him, Dean,” she told him tiredly, shoulders slumping for a moment. “I mean, I didn’t bring him to Boston so he could get worse.”

Dean scoffed. “What are you talking about, ‘get worse?’ He’s fine.”

“He’s not fine, you jackass.” Benny put a hand on her arm, and Meg settled down. “You know, when I met him, we hated each other. He was this guy, fresh out of Stanford Law and right into Quantico. He seemed to have the whole world on a plate, right in front of him. He knew exactly what he wanted and he wasn’t shy about going for it, either. And he cared. Holy crap did he care. After Georgia he pulled back. Wasn’t interested in dating anymore – stopped trying, stopped accepting. If one of us dragged him out though, he’d still come." She sighed. “I came up to Boston, yeah, because I wanted to be closer to my family. But I also…I figured it would be good for him to get away. To make a fresh start. See if he could form some attachments, maybe. Not even necessarily romantic attachments, but find something to hold onto. A hobby, something. And at first I thought it was working. You know, he really hit it off with Jody, we could all go out and watch a game or something. But ever since you came back into his life – ever since he had to sit there and hear you say that you couldn’t even stand to look at him – it’s all gone right out the window and all he does is his job. He works, he goes to the gym and he sits in his room."

The agent glowered and toyed with her coaster. “I figured…hell, I don’t know what I figured. I figured that you’d care. Or something. Worry.” 

Dean’s fingers toyed with his tie, more or less of their own accord. “Look, Meg,” he tried. “He won’t even let me in. I want to help, I do, but he doesn’t take my calls and he sure as hell doesn’t seem to enjoy my company. Find him some girl. Hook them up, let him get good and attached to her.” 

Benny scowled at him. “Dean, you’re being a jackass. You’re acting like the jealous ex here, even though you’re accusing Sam of jealousy.”

Dean slapped the table. It stung. “What’s your suggestion, then? He doesn’t want me around!”

“Do you think you could try to be around him without being a judgmental jerk?” his friend suggested. “Try spending some time with him just because you want to. Go…I don’t know. Go grab dinner with him. Just the two of you, just because it’s fun.”

“It’s not fun,” Dean objected, draining his glass. “It’s like walking on glass. He doesn’t say anything, and I feel like I’m walking on broken glass barefoot trying to say something that won’t piss him off or whatever. He hates me.”

“So give him a chance to not hate you,” Meg urged. “Take him out tomorrow night. Make him eat something too,” she added. “He needs it.”

“He’s never eaten much when something’s bugging him,” Dean added without thinking. “It’s just him.”

“I’ve noticed,” she sniffed. “Anyway. I figure between the two of us we can do our thing, on our own, and maybe compare notes and try to work with each other on the sly to try to help him out behind his back.” 

Dean cringed. “Doing anything behind his back has never worked out well for anyone,” he admitted, “but I have to admit that it’s probably the best idea.” He picked up his phone and went to dial. 

Meg put a hand on his. “He prefers text.”

Dean rolled his eyes, but he obediently typed out a text. **Hey. What are you doing tomorrow night around eight thirty? ******

The reply came back within a minute. **Putting my ammo in order by size and manufacturer. Why?**

**I thought we might grab a beer or something. You up for it? There’s a place in Allston, has a hundred and twelve beers on tap.**

The response took several minutes to come back, and Dean frowned at his companions. “He’s not on board.”

“Give him a minute, Dean,” Benny urged. “He’s got to wrap his head around this – I mean, it’s kind of out of character for what you’ve been showing him for the past few weeks.”

Finally the response did come back. **Sure. I’ll be there at eight thirty. See you then.**

You could have knocked Dean over with beer foam. 

The next day passed in a haze of anxiety and anticipation for Dean. He hadn’t felt like this in years, decades – not since he’d been in high school, getting ready to take some girl out and maybe score or something. And even then he’d had the sure thing of Sam at home if the girl wasn’t on board. Now he didn’t have that, and he wasn’t exactly hoping to score with Sam. Probably. 

No, he wasn’t. It would be a terrible idea. Sure, Sam was hot, but Dean knew better now and he wasn’t into guys. Had never been into guys, only Sam, and they didn’t need to do that because they had healthier options. Getting back together wasn’t on the table and it wasn’t what either of them was looking for. 

Still, he wanted to show Sam…something. He wanted to show him that he respected him by looking nice for him, he guessed. He wanted to show Sam that he was successful, that he’d made something of himself by sticking with their father – that he’d outdone Sam, even though he’d been obedient. And he honestly wanted to show Sam that he’d given something up by walking away. 

Sam met him at the bar exactly on time. He’d clearly come from work, just as Dean had; his suit had been unbuttoned and his tie loosened, but that was absolutely his “Fed suit” and the way it had rumpled around him screamed that he’d been wearing it all day. He looked tired but he smiled when he saw Dean, like he was almost happy to see him. They got seats, they got beers and they ordered food.

The conversation was awkward, at first. Dean felt like every possible avenue of conversation was forbidden at first. He asked about the shoulder. Sam answered. Sam asked about Dean’s day at work. Dean babbled until he felt like Sam had to be ready to fall asleep. Their food came. Finally Sam asked about Ben. 

“He’s doing well. He asked about you again. He’s got another game coming up, says he wants you there.” 

Sam blushed. He’d always blushed so prettily. Even now, with that five o’clock shadow crawling over his jaw, the effect still went straight to Dean’s groin. Fuck. “Seriously?” Sam scoffed, oblivious to the sexual crisis going on in Dean’s body. “I mean, he’s a nice kid and if he actually wants me there I’ll go, but why would he…I mean, I’m just some creepy giant he met once. Why would he have any interest in seeing me again?”

Dean shrugged and reached for his water. “I mean, who knows why kids fixate on anything, but you gave him pointers that won the game for his team the last time you were there. That probably has a lot to do with it. Plus, you talked to him like he’s a person. The rest of us mostly remember him as a little kid, from when he was still learning to talk and stuff. You know, you don’t have that. You’ve always known him the way he is now. Toilet trained and everything.” He chuckled and, much to his surprise, Sam chuckled right along with him. “He’s pretty into you, though.”

“Well, I’ll be there then.” Sam looked to the side for a moment. “I’m not much good with kids. Never really was.”

“Couldn’t prove it by Ben, man. It’s, uh, it’s good to see you hanging around him, you know? Makes it feel like things are getting better.”

Sam toyed with his beer. “Yeah. It does.”


	6. Can't Even Taste If My Food's Alive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Football, dates and bad ideas

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter features a graphic masturbation scene. If this is not to your taste, skip the part after drinks with Meg and Benny.

Sam sat through that night at the bar with his brother like someone had broken an entire six-pack on his chair. He’d texted Sam out of the blue wanting to meet up and grab beers and maybe dinner at some bar somewhere, and hospitals could just bottle that up and replace their artificial adrenaline with that stuff because his heart had just gone off to the races when he’d gotten that text. Then he’d shown up out of the blue looking like some kind of model. Not that Dean wasn’t beautiful all of the time, but he’d clearly taken a moment to think about what he’d put on his body and let it show him off to advantage…Sam should have stayed away.

He should have stayed away because he couldn’t trust himself to not just throw his arms around Dean and beg him, plead for another chance and another opportunity to please just let them be them again, he didn’t care how fucked up it was and he didn’t care how terrible an idea it was for his career or for Dean’s career, he’d pay the price a thousand times over if he could just feel Dean’s hands and mouth on him one more time. It was wrong; he knew that it was wrong. It wasn’t even how he felt, not entirely and not really. But right now, looking at Dean, he’d have said it and he’d have meant it. 

It would have gotten him precisely nowhere, of course. Dean had his beautiful new life, he was respectable and he had the admiration of his colleagues. He had a son, for crying out loud. Even if Sam wanted to get back together – and he didn’t think he did, not really – Dean would never have allowed something so disgusting around his son.

And apparently he did want Sam around his son, or he was willing to allow Sam to be around his son because his son wanted Sam around. Or he said his son wanted Sam around, it was hard to suss out what was really going on there. Maybe the kid was an excuse, but why? Why would Dean lie about Ben’s affection just to keep him around? Was it to try to engage Sam’s family-feeling, in the hopes that he’d keep quiet about what had come before? _If you tell anyone, anyone at all, we’ll both get in trouble. I’ll go to jail. You’ll go to jail. Dad will go to jail. You don’t want that, do you, Sammy?_

So Sam sat in his chair and played with the one pint of IPA regulations allowed him when he was on call and tried not to think about the reasons he was allowed to bask in his brother’s presence. He also tried not to stare, and he tried not to think too much about the fact that he’d come straight from work and looked like crap in a cheap suit. Instead he let the sense of Dean wash over him.

“Hey, do you golf at all?” Dean asked as they got their check. Sam had eaten almost half of his salad.

“Golf?’ Sam snorted. “Seriously?”

“What? It’s a sport. Don’t they teach it at Quantico?” His brother was grinning so he had to be teasing about that.

“Sorry, no. Laboratory analysis of golf balls maybe.” He’d seen a case where the golf balls had been little bombs once, triggered by impact. That had been exciting.

“Huh. That sounds…well, it sounds dull as shit, honestly, but you probably wouldn’t be terribly turned on by a surgery conference either so whatever. Anyway, Ben’s got a golf lesson at the country club in a couple of weeks. I was going to see if you might want to come and play a few rounds. You know, as my guest.” Dean looked at him and bit his lip, just a little. “I mean, I can teach you a little. It has to be beneficial somehow, right? I mean, I’m sure you must go up against some baddies who golf.” 

Sam paused. He wanted to say no. He should say no, he should stay far away. His reactions to Dean weren’t right and they weren’t even his, they were conditioned into him. “Okay,” he found himself saying. “If nothing comes up for work, sure. What could the harm be?”

And so Sam found himself showing up to another of his nephew’s games. He told himself that it was just to see whether it was the boy or Dean who wanted to see him there but he got no more clues by the end of the game than he had going in. Lisa, Ben’s mother, seemed friendlier at least. She made sure that she had Sam’s phone number and made sure that Sam had hers, and why she would want to do that was well beyond Sam’s comprehension. Still, he smiled and nodded and made all the right noises so that the adults could focus on Ben like they ought.

He decided he liked Lisa, though. It was too bad she and Dean hadn’t worked out. She was good people – sensible, down to earth, affectionate. Sometimes he wondered what had gone wrong.

Golf proved to be as dull as it looked on TV. Dean made it interesting, though. Oh, God, did Dean ever make it interesting. He put his hands directly onto Sam’s to show him how to grip the golf club and direct the amount of force with which he was supposed to strike the ball, and that caused a response that was clearly hardwired into him because he hadn’t reacted like that to anyone or anything since he’d gotten back from Georgia. The country club, too, was an experience. Dean introduced him around to a bunch of people as “my brother, Sam.” There was only a little bit of hesitation there, only a tiny grimace that Sam probably only even noticed because he was looking for it. If he tried he could almost make himself believe that this was real, that Dean wasn’t ashamed of him. That they could at least be brothers – not again, because they’d never been normal brothers to begin with, but brothers anyway. 

The thing was, Sam was an investigator. He was a damn good investigator – maybe he’d never been much of a lover or boyfriend or fiancé but he was a fine investigator. It was an instinct at this point. So as he went to the games and followed Dean to the country club or to the bar, he observed and all of the little tells were there, damn it. He wasn’t comfortable with Sam. He kept staring when he thought Sam couldn’t see, he kept watching Sam every time Sam interacted with Ben or with Lisa or with Benny for that matter. He observed Sam so closely at the country club that Sam thought he must have forgotten to put on pants that day, clearly so worked up about the possibility of Sam making some kind of gaffe and exposing him or something that he couldn’t tear his goddamn eyes away.

Which raised the question – why bring Sam around at all? If it made him so damn squeamish, why drag him out like some kind of half-reclaimed feral dog? It wasn’t for himself, and it wasn’t for Adam because Adam turned his back every time Sam cast his eyes that way. Maybe it was for Ben – the boy definitely seemed to be genuinely fond of Sam, for reasons that completely escaped the agent. Still, even allowing Sam around Ben at all had probably been the result of pressure from an outside source and it was up to Sam to figure out what that source was. 

Which left…Benny. And Meg. Meg was spending a lot of time around Dean’s best friend – which was fine, of course. They were dating, people did that. Meg did that, and she should do that. She was a gorgeous woman, she had a lot of love to give and she’d come back to her native area to settle down a bit. She should date. Whether she should date Dean’s best friend was another matter entirely, but Benny seemed to make her happy. As long as Benny was making Meg happy for Meg, and not because he was trying to get dirt on Sam, then Sam would celebrate it until his dying day.   
He just didn’t welcome this kind of interference. Meg probably meant well. Hell, Benny might mean well too; he certainly always came off gently. But they didn’t know, they couldn’t understand, the dynamic involved here.

Sam came to win the lottery for the office’s Patriots tickets one weekend. He offered them to Meg, who frowned at him. “I mean yeah, I love the Pats, but don’t you think you might want to reciprocate some of Dean’s overtures?”

Bingo, Sam thought. Still, set-up by Meg or not, she might have a point. “What do you mean?”

“Well, Dean’s been bending over backwards to try to bring you into his life. He invites you to things all the time. Don’t you want to return the favor?”

He shifted. “I don’t know, Meg. I mean, I don’t really have anything to invite him to, you know?” He hated having Dean see him the way he was now. “Maybe it’s too late.”

She froze. “What do you mean, ‘too late?’” 

“I mean, maybe it’s too late to build that kind of normal brotherly relationship that other families have. You know, where they can just go to a baseball game and not have it get all weird.” He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling tiles. “I mean, it’s weird.”

“What’s weird is you thinking it’s baseball. The Patriots play football. At Foxboro.” She shook her head and sat on his desk. “Maybe it’s awkward because he feels like he’s the one doing all the work. This is a chance to make him feel like you want him in your life as much as he wants you in his.”

He cleared his throat and glanced up at her. “Do I?” 

“What do you mean, ‘Do I?’” She grabbed one of his pens and examined the end. “You have got to stop chewing on your pens like this; you’re going to make one of them explode. Of course you want him back in your life. You’re brothers, and you can be…brothers now. He can keep his hands off you, and you’re not feeling compelled to go touching him. It’s important to have connections, Sam. You need this. I’ll always love you, but you need to have connections to more than one person who cares about you.”

He sighed. It was an old concern of hers. “I’m just not so sure that’s Dean anymore.” He decided not to address the issue of his own urges. They weren’t really his own, they were programmed into him and he could unlearn them. He could. 

“He does care, Sam. He’s worried. You don’t seem happy.” Her shoulders slumped a little as her eyes searched his face. “He’s not alone.” 

“I’m fine, Meg.” He forced a smile. “I’m just…confused. I’m not sure what he wants, and you’re going to have to forgive me if I’m a little…disbelieving, I guess. I mean, he didn’t give a crap if I was happy for thirteen years. Sometimes, sure, it seems like he wants to patch things up and have a normal relationship. Sometimes it seems like he’s ashamed of me. He can’t even stand to explain to Ben what I do for a living, you know? Never mind when he introduces me around at his country club or whatever. It’s not, ‘This is my brother, Sam, he’s with the FBI.’ It’s not, ‘This is my brother, Sam, he graduated early from Stanford.’ It’s not, ‘This is my brother, Sam, he took down the shooter at the courthouse last month.’ It’s just, ‘This is Sam.’ For him I’ll always be the family disappointment.” 

Meg looked away. “I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even know about Stanford, Sam. And I’m sure he’s not ashamed of you at all.” 

“He is. I did something unforgivable, in their eyes – in his eyes – and it’s impossible to get back from that. Even trying is an exercise in futility; I might as well try to swim across Lake Michigan.” 

Still, he did take Dean to the Pats game, along with Ben because it was the weekend and Dean had custody of Ben on the weekends apparently. Dean asked if he could bring a guest – “These tickets usually come in packs of four, right, Sammy?” Sam seethed internally at the thought of Dean bringing a date, but what was he really going to do – tell Dean, “No, sorry, this is our date time?” 

Much to his surprise, when he got to Dean’s house Dean’s plus one turned out to be a six foot tall man, with wavy dark hair and piercing blue eyes. Dr. Cas Novak turned out to be an allergy and asthma specialist at Boston General, bright enough and with the absolute driest sense of humor that Sam had ever encountered. His delivery was so deadpan that sometimes it was hard to tell if he was joking, but he had a minute grasp of the strategy and statistics behind the game of football that made him a reasonably fun guy to watch the game with.

Ben could have lived without him. Ben thought he was boring. If Sam had been eight years old he’d have probably thought Cas was boring too. Since Sam was thirty-one, and enjoyed things like statistics for reasons that even he couldn’t explain, he found himself relaxing a little more in the blue-eyed man’s company.

Why had Dean brought him, though? There didn’t seem to be anything going on between them. They didn’t act like lovers, or even like former lovers. They just acted like good friends. Every once in a while Cas would stare at Dean with this really intense gaze and Sam would think, “Is he trying to put a move on my brother?” but no – Cas just had a very intense eye. He looked at everyone that way. Dean. Sam. Ben. The field. His program. His beer. 

Sam drove them all home after the game. Cas lived in Newton, which wasn’t that far from Brookline (Sam was learning more and more about the warren that was Boston every day) so it was convenient just to drop him off on the way. He dropped Dean and Ben off and hurried along home despite the invitation to stay for dinner. 

Benny was at the townhouse when they got there, sitting in the living room watching terrible Sunday night television and sharing martinis with Meg. They immediately poured a drink for Sam – they’d had a glass right there, waiting for him, so they must have been planning for his company. Either he was a welcome addition to their television watching party or they were lying in wait waiting for him to report, and he hated that he had to make the distinction. Still, he accepted the drink. “So, Sam,” Meg began as Sam settled in on the couch and tried to make some sense out of the atrocious Cowboys score. “How was the game?”

“The defense needs shoring up,” he told her honestly. “Too many holes, they didn’t seem to know if they were coming or going.” 

Benny frowned at him. “The Patriots won, cher.” 

Sam sipped from his drink. “The defense still needs shoring up, Benny. If they want to make it to the playoffs they’ll need to tighten everything up.” And not go sipping martinis with people whose motivations were still unclear, he reminded himself. “Ben had fun, though. I guess he’s never been to Gillette?”

“Only reporters call it Gillette,” the psychiatrist pointed out. “And that’s just because they have to. Everyone here still calls it Foxboro. I’m glad you were able to bring Ben to a game before the weather got too cold and while it was still early enough for him.”

“I’m glad it wasn’t too crowded for you,” Meg added.

Sam shrugged. “I’d be a crap agent if I couldn’t hold it together in a crowd, Meg.”

“Point,” she grinned. She knew when she was mother henning, at least. “How about Dean, how was he?”

“Fine. A little stiff, but whatever. Baby steps and all that,” he lied. He took another sip and waited to see what his friend and her boyfriend knew.

He didn’t have to wait long. “So Sam,” Benny began, clearing his throat and leaning forward. “I understand that Dean brought a friend with him.” 

“Yeah. Dr. Novak, I think. Allergy and asthma specialist, I think. I don’t think Ben much cares for him but hey.” He sipped again, watched their faces.

Meg glanced at Benny. Benny glanced at Meg, who moistened her lips and tasted her own drink before replying. “What did you think of him?”

Right. A set-up, then. “Nice enough guy. Kind of intense about statistics, but that’s not a bad thing in a sports fan. Doesn’t seem like Dean’s type, but I’m not exactly a great judge of who he might be friends with. Oh, come on!” he cried at the television. “How is that a face mask violation? The guy head butted him!”

Later, in the privacy of his own room, he had time to ponder the revelations of the conversation. He didn’t know what he wanted from Dean, didn’t know what he could have or what was fair for him to expect. Sometimes he didn’t think Dean knew what he wanted from Sam either. Sometimes he seemed to want Sam to stay away entirely. Sometimes he seemed to want Sam to come back if he came on his knees begging forgiveness and sometimes, just sometimes, he seemed to look at Sam in a way that said that he was just one errant look or touch away from grabbing Sam and running his hands up and down his body just to find all the new muscle and new scars.

Today he’d seen all three facets. There were times during that game when Dean had ignored Sam completely, to the point where even Ben had commented on it. There were times when Dean had been friendly enough, if a little smug and superior. And there were times when, even though he’d brought Cas, he seemed like he wanted to rip his friend’s face right off. Which of the three was real? Which was he allowed to have? Which one was he allowed to even want? 

_I saw you kissing that girl, Sammy._

The memory came back even as he turned his mind to the man his brother had brought. It had been a set-up. Meg and Benny had colluded in the set-up, but Dean had been a participant. Sam wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Well, he was sure he didn’t like it. It felt like charity. It felt like pity. It felt like the little old ladies in villages all over the world, the ones who could barely keep a roof over their own heads but took one look at him and shook their heads and dragged him indoors and sat him down at their tables because “You would think the big American doctor could at least keep his sons fed,” and shared their mite with him. Whose idea had it been to set him up? If he’d wanted a date he could get one of his own, thank you very much.

And yet, was Cas such a bad thing? He was intelligent. He had a good sense of humor, if you listened for it. He had a nice smile, and his eyes were a brilliant blue. He smelled nice. Taken objectively, he wasn’t outside the set of people to whom Sam would be attracted, back when dating was something he still tried to do. 

Was there any chemistry? He closed his eyes and tried to imagine those lips on his. Okay. It had been a long time, years, since anyone had touched their lips to his and why anyone would want to now was literally beyond him – _stop overthinking this, dumbass_ , he told himself. _For God’s sake, you’re probably the only person who can literally think himself out of a late night fantasy session._

Okay. Right. He closed his eyes again and made himself think about Cas’ lips. They were nice enough – a little chapped, maybe. They’d look better if they were a little redder, maybe a little swollen from kissing. Sam had enjoyed kissing, back when sex and romance were still things for him. He could probably kiss Cas’ lips for hours, leave him in such a state that his patients knew exactly what he’d been up to. Maybe they’d stop there, because there was nothing wrong with just hanging around in a nice, leafy park by a pond or something and kissing until squirrels bombarded you with acorns just to make you stop.

Or maybe they wouldn’t stop. Maybe they’d take it back here, to Sam’s room. Maybe here they’d take it a little further. Maybe Cas would want to touch his chest through his shirt, or maybe he’d want to put those hands up under his shirt. Maybe he’d want to take Sam’s shirt off altogether, discarding it by the side of the bed as Sam did for himself now.

_Come on, Sammy. You ain’t got nothing to hide. Let your big brother see._

He chased the thoughts away. He wasn’t going to think about the past, he was trying to think about possibly having sex with someone appropriate. Cas, to be specific. Blue eyes, meeting his as the smaller man ducked his head and took one of his nipples into his mouth. He ran a hand over his chest, resolutely ignoring the way his fingertips caught on the raised puckers of his scars on their way to tease his own nipple. He’d always liked having his nipples played with and this was no exception. His cock filled and lengthened for the first time in years in response, and he almost laughed out loud in his delight. God, he had missed this. 

In his fantasy, dream-Cas moved his attention lower once Sam’s erection began to take hold. Carefully, he removed Sam’s pajama bottoms and boxers. Sam wanted to be entirely naked for this – if he was going to make a comeback he was going to go all the way. He took Sam into a well-calloused hand – a good surgeon’s hand, with long, strong, steady fingers – and began to stroke. He moved gently at first, then picked up speed and force as a little bit of precome slicked the way. Sam parted his legs, to make it more comfortable for both of them and to grant his fictional lover easier access to his hole if he wanted it. Christ, he must be better if he was thinking about bottoming again – recovered from Dean, recovered from Georgia, recovered from everything. 

_Look at you, all spread out for me like that. Knew you wanted it, Sammy._

His brother’s voice in his head was enough to chase his erection back into the fantasy realm from which it sprang. Sure, Dean had wanted him then, but he didn’t now. Maybe if Sam had made the choice to wash his hands of Dean it would have been different, but he hadn’t. Instead Dean was sitting there trying to pawn his used up toy off on someone else like something he’d leave at the church box. 

Sam put his pajamas back on. Who was he kidding? Cas, even as a favor to Dean or to Benny, whichever, wouldn’t want to see his scars. No one wanted to see his scars, even his own doctors looked away. Even Sam didn’t want to see Sam’s scars any more than he had to, in the shower every day. 

Fuck. It wasn’t even necessarily that he wanted Dean. He did, he didn’t even really have a choice about that, but that wasn’t even the problem. It was the fact that he’d come to a point in his life where he wanted Dean again, and he couldn’t even make himself function with himself thinking about anyone else. 

He’d love to head out with Cas a time or two, maybe more. Dr. Roberts – Cara – was a stunningly gorgeous woman and both Jody and Meg reminded him at least twice a week about how he’d blown a spectacular chance there. He’d been doing fine when he still didn’t want anyone at all; why did he have to find himself shackled to his brother in this particular way? He hadn’t been tied to Dean this way even when they’d been together. 

No one could have foreseen that coming to Boston would have the consequences it did, but maybe Sam should have planned a bit better. Maybe he should have done some research, tracked down his big brother before making any moves at all. He hadn’t; he’d been too weak. He hadn’t wanted to be reminded, and this was what came of it. 

The next morning he went in to work as usual. When Meg was in an interview room, he picked up the phone and dialed a number. 

“Sam!” Assistant Director Campbell’s voice practically boomed out of the receiver. “It’s good to hear from you, buddy. It’s just not the same around here in Quantico without you and Meg around to keep us on our toes.” 

“Hey, Boston’s fielded its fair share of the fun ones so far,” Sam pointed out. “Did you see that guy we pulled out of the airport the other day?”

“I know, right?” his former mentor snorted. “What was he even thinking, trying to get that onto a plane?”

“Nah, the plane just gave us probable cause,” the lawyer dismissed. “Had eyes on him for weeks up until that day. Faked being a TSA agent and nabbed him, there was never any danger to the public and no one ever knew anything happened except us and the TSA guys on the ground.” 

“Nice work. Who was he with?”

“Hardline Quebecois separatists, sir.” 

Samuel’s silence spoke volumes. “Is that a thing?”

“So many things are things. And hey – all it takes is one ‘true believer’ with a little knowledge and a lot of explosives. He doesn’t have to be speaking for a majority, or even for more than a dozen people to be a bad guy.” Sam let himself grin. He was legitimately proud of that case.

“Ain’t that the truth. So are you bored in Beantown yet, Sam? Ready to come home? I know that Gwen and Christian and Mark would literally kill just to have you back with us again.” 

Sam closed his eyes. Maybe they did want to work with him at that. It wasn’t about him, though, it was about the job, the assets that he brought to the table. “I’ll admit that the caseload is a little different from what I’m used to,” he told the senior agent. “A little slower pace, I guess. Maybe, I mean. I’ve been shot already and I’ve only been here what, two months?”

“You never did like to let the grass grow under your feet,” Campbell chuckled. “Hey, listen. I got a weird request for assistance from the UK. We could use a guy with your expertise.” 

Sam considered. He shouldn’t say yes, all things considered. The last time that Samuel had “gotten a request” he’d wound up in a cage being tortured. At the same time, right now being in Boston, with Dean, was suffocating him. “I mean, I can’t say yes or no. SSA Mills is my supervisor and she’d have to sign off on any temporary assignments. I’m committed to trying to figure out this whole field office, trying to live in one place for a while thing, sir.”

“How long’s that going to last?” Campbell scoffed. “I’ve known you for years, Sam. Except for the time you spent in college and at Quantico, you never had a settled home. You wouldn’t know what to do with one if you had one.” 

“Tell me about it,” Sam admitted. “Turns out my older brother’s been living in Boston for at least a decade. Ran into him recently and it’s like he’s trying to show me something.” He rolled his eyes, like his former boss could see that over the phone. Maybe he could, at that. “I swear, next thing will be a barbecue. With hot dogs.”

“A barbecue? Sam, that would have you sick for a month.” 

“I know, right?” Sam shook his head. 

“I’ll talk to your supervisor, see what I can’t do about getting you staffed on that project for me. It’s not a permanent solution but it should buy you a little breathing room.” He hesitated. “That – that is what you’re looking for, right, Sam?”

Sam sighed. “It wouldn’t be unappreciated, sir.”

Sam got a call from Cas a couple of days later, inviting him to a friend’s exhibit opening at a Newbury Street gallery. Sam considered going, he truly did. Cas was a pleasant enough companion, and maybe he should get out more. The memory of that night, alone in the dark and trying to think of the dark-haired man, stopped him. He liked and respected him too much to lead him on. Instead he made an excuse, pleading a heavy caseload. Meg disapproved, as Sam knew she would, but what was he supposed to do? Hand out cards to every potential date that read “I’m a fuckup and I can’t even get it up anymore without all of my dumb, stupid baggage weighing it back down?” No, backing out gently was the only polite solution, at least until he could get away from Dean’s all-pervading presence. 

Jody found out about Campbell’s request three days after Sam spoke to him, proving that an Assistant Director’s title can move mountains when it comes to red tape. “Sam, I thought the whole point of you transferring to this office was so that he couldn’t pull this kind of shit again,” she raged as she stormed over to his desk. 

Since she stormed over to his desk in full view of the rest of the office, Meg heard. “Who?” she demanded warily. “What kind of shit?”

“Samuel Campbell is ‘requesting’ the temporary assignment of Agent Winchester to serve on a classified assignment per request of an outside agency. God damn it, he does not get to just reach in and grab you.” She slammed her hand on his desk, face red.

Meg’s eyes narrowed. “Crowley,” she hissed. “It’s Crowley, isn’t it?”

Sam didn’t know for sure, but he suspected he knew. Crowley and Campbell were good friends, after all. “No idea,” he admitted. “He told me that they needed my specific skill set on a very short term mission. I’ll be back before December even really kicks off.” 

“Wait – you want to do this?” Meg blinked. “I need to talk to you. In private.” 

Jody blinked, but let them take one of the conference rooms. “Sam. You can’t do this.”

“Meg, it’s not a big deal. I didn’t join the bureau to ride a desk.” He forced himself to smile a little. “Face it, we have a fairly unique skill set, okay? Sometimes they’re going to need people who speak unique languages. Who don’t need defending.” 

“You need defending from them!” she raged. “Have you forgotten that they let you rot in a cage?”

“I can’t forget that, Meg,” he told her softly. “Not ever. But I can’t let it define me, either. I need to do my job. And I need to…”

“What? Is it me and Benny? Because I’ll kick his ass to the curb so fast that you won’t be able to see him moving –”

Sam’s stomach lurched at the thought that she might give up that happiness, the comfort that Benny gave her, because of him. “Oh God, Meg, no. No, I’m happy you’ve found him. Not so thrilled with all the scheming about me and Dean. But I’m happy for you and Benny. It’s, uh. It’s Dean.”

Her face fell. “What?”

“Being around him again. It’s. Um. It’s screwing me up. I don’t know what he wants, I don’t know what I want, and I just really need to get away from him for a little bit and, you know, figure out where my head’s at when he’s not right in front of me. Get a sense of what’s reasonable, if that makes any sense.” 

She threw her arms around him and he flinched, but managed to hold her in return when he realized she was crying. “I thought he’d be good for you, Sam,” she told him. “I really did.” 

“I know,” he whispered into her ear, placing a small kiss over the shell. “I know you did. And maybe he still can be. The problem isn’t him, it’s me. I don’t know how to do this, and I need to remind myself that I’m here to do a job. Not to make up for the one that I decided to not do. Okay?” 

She squeezed him and let go, and he helped her clean up a bit.

When they went back out into the office, Jody signed off on the assignment. “Your ass had better come back in one piece, Winchester.” 


	7. I Talk Of Six While Forgetting Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Guess who's (not) coming to dinner?

Dean frowned at Lisa. “I’m sorry, you want to do what now?”

She rolled her eyes at him as she took Ben’s bag. “I want you to invite Sam to Thanksgiving dinner. It’s a simple request. I made it in very plain English.” She laughed. “I spoke with Matt, and we both think it’s a good idea. Ben’s crazy about him. Did you know he asks to call Sam at least twice a week?”

“He what?” Dean shook his head. “Neither of them cleared that with me.”

His ex-wife cocked her head to one side and put the bag down. “Yeah, pretty sure no one needs to get permission to call family members on the phone, Dean. I was right there, it was on speaker, it’s not like he was secretly trying to convert our son to some kind of weird runners’ cult.” 

“You don’t know Sammy,” he blurted before he could stop himself. “You don’t know how he can be. He’s…he’s subtle, Lis. He’ll have Ben wanting to study…I don’t know, freaking art. Or, or, I don’t know. You know how many times Sam ran off when he was a kid? Or –”

“Sam is a very well-respected federal agent, Dean.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “He’s a good man. He’s a good uncle. And my son wants a closer relationship with him. If that’s what he wants, and Sam’s okay with talking to him on the phone a little bit, then I’m okay with it. His reading and French scores have already gone up because of it. Now. You can be the one to extend an olive branch and invite your brother to be a part of a family Thanksgiving dinner or I can do it and you can sit there and feel ashamed of yourself while he sits across from you at the table and eats your share of the stuffing.”

“He hates stuffing.” Dean ran his fingers through his hair. “Lisa, think about Adam here. Adam hates the kid, can’t even stand to be in the same space as him. Are you seriously going to force Adam to sit through an important holiday meal with someone he hates?”

“Adam needs to grow the hell up, Dean. He’s a twenty-five year old man, he can’t sit there and nurse a grudge because Sam didn’t let someone else manage his life for him. If he can’t handle it he can go to Thanksgiving dinner at Maryann’s house.” She tossed her head back. He recognized her entire stance from the last couple of years of their marriage, when he’d been too stupid to realize that motherhood meant that she wasn’t going to be nearly as willing to yield and accommodate anymore.

“It’s a bad idea, Lisa.”

“It’s happening one way or another, Dean. You can be part of it or not.”

And it was going to happen. He could see it in the set of her jaw, the straightness of her spine and the line of her shoulders. “Sounds great, Lisa,” he lied. “I just want to make sure you know what you’re in for.” 

“It’ll be great. Besides, Janette is coming and she broke up with Steve back in June. She’s got a thing for tall guys.” Lisa grinned. “I think she’d be just the thing to bring him out of his shell a little, don’t you?”

“Maybe. I tried to set him up with Cas, but he claimed a heavy caseload when Cas tried to get him to go to Balthazar’s thing at that gallery downtown, so I guess that was pretty one-sided.” He fought down the bile that rose in his throat at the idea of setting Sam up with a woman. He could cope with the idea of Sam and Cas together – barely, but he could cope. He’d never been able to stand the sight of Sam with a girl, any girl.

_Dean! What the hell? You do it all the time!_

Yeah, sure, Dean had gone off with girls all the time, but that was Dean. He’d had a string of girls throughout their youth, right through college because it hadn’t freaking mattered. None of them had been even a little bit serious. Sam had been the serious one; Sam was the one who had mattered. The girls were nice, he liked the attention and he liked fooling around, but at the end of the day they were a red herring for anyone who might suspect about the brothers who walked a little too close, who moved a little too in sync with each other. He could be trusted around girls because they were just girls, up until Sammy left anyway.

Sammy was different. Sammy got attached. Sammy got attached to everyone and everything, everywhere they went. He got attached to the little old ladies in the villages. He got attached to the sheep and the goats. He got attached to the apartments and the huts and the shacks and the tents they called homes in all of the war zones and the disaster areas and the dumps and the dives. He got attached to the mice and the roaches, for crying out loud. Sammy couldn’t be trusted around girls. 

But things were different now. Sammy had walked away from him, turned his back on Dean. He couldn’t hold Sam to those standards anymore. If he wanted a girl, let him have a girl. Right? 

He could think of it that way in the light of day, but by himself in his dark bedroom he had to face the fact that he wasn’t as over Sammy as he wanted to be. God, the thought of having Sammy at Thanksgiving, of being around him and not being able to put his hands on him, was almost more than he could handle. He was supposed to be past this. He couldn’t have Sammy anymore. Even though he wanted, and God did he want, it would be the absolute undoing of everything he’d achieved over the past thirteen years. He’d never be able to rebuild his life after even one night with his brother again.

That Sam wanted, or would want, to pick things up again didn’t even merit doubt. He’d taken some convincing when they’d been kids, but Dean had always managed to talk him around and he’d genuinely enjoyed everything they’d done together. Dean knew exactly how to get Sammy’s motor running, because he’d taught Sam everything himself. 

Maybe some things had changed. Not the fundamentals, Dean was sure of that. Sammy would still kiss like a drowning man gasped for air – like he’d die without it, like it was literally the only thing keeping him alive. He’d still like to have his nipples played with, of course, because that had been one of the first things that Dean had discovered about his little brother. If the state of his pens was any indication he still had that oral fixation; he probably still sucked cock like a goddamn pro and he had a natural talent with that perfect pink tongue of his. 

But what did he look like under all of those layers now? He’d seen his shoulder, and to be sure that had changed. Sam then had been scrawny. Sam now was muscular, the kind of hard body artists held up as the ideal – or at least, he was as far as Dean could tell with all of that fabric in the way.

Spending time around Sammy didn’t make that need go away. It made it worse, and the kind of proximity that occurred at a major holiday like Thanksgiving wouldn’t help. Still, it was going to happen with or without him. He might as well play along.

He took his time about communicating the request. He took his phone out to text, and he put it back. He repeated the process a dozen times in between dropping Ben off on Sunday and finally hitting send on Wednesday. He hesitated over wording, he fretted over timing, he fussed over tone. When he finally managed to get the message out, he sat back and congratulated himself on a job well done, ignoring the surge of adrenaline that made him feel like he’d just survived a parachute jump.

He wasn’t sure what he expected in response. “What time and where?” would have been the bare minimum. “What should I bring?” would have been an excellent accompaniment. Given the situation, an actual phone call with surprise and possibly tears of gratitude would not have been out of the question. 

“Sorry, can’t. On assignment, back in early December,” wasn’t even close to being in the realm of possibilities. 

That was, however, the text he received in return. He stared at his phone in blank incomprehension for a moment before dialing his brother’s phone. The little bitch might prefer text but he was going to pick up the damn phone for this one.

And he did. “Winchester,” Sam greeted, like he hadn’t even glanced at the screen. Or like he’d never bothered to program Dean’s name into his contacts. Like he never planned to stick around. 

“What the hell, Sammy?” Dean seethed, grabbing one of the squishy “stress relief” toys people were always leaving on his desk in his fist. “What the hell do you mean you’re going on an assignment? It’s Thanksgiving! Put it off!”

Sam huffed out a laugh. “I’m not sure you get how law enforcement actually works, Dean. Criminals don’t take holidays. Neither can we. I’m sorry, but I really can’t make it.”

“They can put it off, or they can put someone else on it. It’s not like you’ve ever taken any family time before,” Dean pointed out in a very reasonable tone. “They’ve got literally thousands of other G-men who can do your job. They can spare you for one day.” 

Sam was silent for a moment. “Actually no, Dean, no they don’t. I was specifically requested for this assignment because they needed someone with my skill set. A combination of skills that only I have. So no, they don’t have thousands of other ‘G-men’ who can do my job. They have one. And I’m it, which is why I’m doing it. They have other guys who can do parts of it, but they have one guy who can do all of it. And I’m going to.” 

Dean had never heard Sammy’s voice sound so cold, not when speaking to him. Maybe to Dad, because Sammy’s anger burned cold almost all of the time, but not to Dean. Right now, though, he couldn’t think about Sammy’s anger because Dean’s own anger burned hot and fast. “Oh come off it, Sam. You’re hardly unique. You’re using the job as an excuse to avoid your obligations to your family. Again. I should have figured you’d pull something like this.”

“Oh come on, Dean, you didn’t even want me there in the first place,” Sam pointed out with a bitter little chuckle. “And now you’re pissed that I’m saying no? Do I need to get a note from my supervisor proving that I really do have to work that weekend, sir?” He wasn’t even trying to keep the mocking tone from his voice. 

“What do you mean I didn’t want you there in the first place?” Dean challenged. A nurse walking by the door jumped from his shouting, and Dean moderated his voice. “I invited you, you giant freak!”

“Because Lisa forced you,” Sam reminded him. “Ben spilled the beans. He was upstairs while you were fighting with Lisa. Heard everything. But I was already assigned to this case before that. I couldn’t have ever said yes. And I can’t just turn around and not show up. I’m going to do my job, Dean. You would do the same damn thing.” 

“I would put my family first,” Dean bit out. “After all this time you owe us this.”

“I don’t owe you shit,” Sam growled, and the line went dead.

Dean threw the stress ball across the office. It narrowly avoided hitting his diploma and bounced almost all the way back to his desk. He couldn’t scream, he couldn’t make it sound like he was losing it here, not in the office. Instead he bit down on his own fist. “Fuck!” he yelled. That should be safe enough, right?

He put his hands on his desk and inhaled, then exhaled. He could calm himself. He could do it; he could conduct himself in a professional manner. He would not, no matter what, let Sam cost him anything more at work.

What the hell could possibly be so important that he couldn’t put it off until after the goddamn holiday? And literally no one at the FBI wasn’t replaceable. They could do without him. Sammy was just doing what he’d always done – pulling back, trying to make Dean chase him because he loved that stuff. He loved to be pursued; he loved to feel like someone wanted him. He was like a girl that way, and Dean had been happy enough to indulge him when they were kids because it got him laid.

Now, though, there was no sex involved. Couldn’t be, no matter how tempted Dean might be, and damn it Sam’s drama queen antics were having an effect on more than just the two of them. The bastard needed to grow the hell up and take his place in family life. Dean wasn’t going to give in to his hissy fit this time.

He expected to get a call from Sam within six hours, twenty-four at the very least. Two days went by, and he heard nothing from his brother. He picked his son up from school, however, and was the proud recipient of a look that could have been a good emergency scalpel. “Dad, Uncle Sam isn’t coming to Thanksgiving!”

Dean bit his tongue. “No, champ. No he’s not.”

“He said he has to work!”

“Then he probably has to work, sport.”

“But he won’t be able to call me until after Thanksgiving! Like, December! I’m scared, Dad! What if bad guys get him?” Ben turned big eyes to him. “I’d rather have him home with us.”

Dean smirked. “Apparently his job is more important to him.” It was probably a dick thing to say to an eight year old. Okay, it was absolutely a dick thing to say to an eight year old. But it was best to manage the kid’s expectations early. He’d be happier in the long term that way. 

Ben just sniffed at him. “Says you. You didn’t even want him there.” 

“Excuse me?” Dean tightened his hands on the steering wheel. He’d never raised his hand to Ben – he wasn’t his father – but he understood why Dad had been so free with the backhand now. “You watch your tone with me, Ben, or you’ll find out really quick just how unpleasant life can get.” 

“He probably won’t come because of you,” Ben sulked, crossing his arms over his chest and looking out the window. “You chased my Uncle Sam away.”

Ben wound up going directly to bed after dinner, without benefit of any electronics or television, and Dean was left to contemplate his own actions instead of spending the evening watching terrible television with his son. Funny how something intended to discipline Ben wound up punishing both of them.

He stood by everything he’d said to Sam. Sammy could have easily called in some of that time he’d accumulated over the years to get a goddamn holiday off. And no one was so essential that they couldn’t take Thanksgiving Day off. Even Dean had the day off, and he was a trauma surgeon. He saved lives, damn it. But he had been harsh. He’d sounded less like a loving brother and more like their father, and their father hadn’t successfully changed Sam’s mind on anything since the kid had been about four. So he’d absolutely set Sam up to dig in his heels, and maybe he should reach out and try to smooth things over. 

His texts went unanswered. So did his calls.

When his fifth text lingered in the ether without any kind of acknowledgement, Dean started to worry. He dialed his phone again. “Hey, Meg,” he greeted when she picked up. “How’s it going?”

“Not as good as I’d hoped, since I’m sitting here talking to you instead of getting my neck nibbled on by a smoking hot psychiatrist in a cute black hat,” she retorted. “What do you need and I really hope it’s good because you are not my favorite person right now?”

He pulled his face away from the handset for a moment. “Excuse me?”

“You weren’t content to leave Sam a mess in 2002, you had to do it again now?” She gave a little growl. “I was so hoping that you’d be good for him, but instead you’ve run him clear out of town.”

“What the hell, Meg?” Dean snapped. “I just called to find out why he’s not answering his damn phone!”

“Ugh,” she snarled. “We’re going to have to do this in person, aren’t we? Benny, hold that thought. We’re going to your buddy’s.” 

Dean heard his best friend in the background. “Try not to mark him up too bad, cher. Don’t want people getting the wrong idea now.” 

Dean hadn’t intended to have company, but he figured the house was clean enough to greet people who invited themselves over. Especially when they invited themselves over to force conversations he didn’t want to have.

They arrived quickly, all things considered, and helped themselves to beer from the fridge. Dean decided he didn’t even want to know how Meg just kind of instinctively knew where the beer was. That had to be a constitutional violation; there wasn’t a warrant for his liquid chattels out there. “Alright,” the surgeon sighed as his guests made themselves at home on his couch. “You want to explain to me why my brother won’t answer my texts? And why you can’t just answer over the phone like a normal human being?”

Meg smirked at him. “Oh, Dean, you wound me. Here I was thinking you were just as eager to see me as I was eager to see your shining face.” She fluttered her eyelashes at him as she leaned her head against Benny’s chest.

“Easy, cher,” Benny murmured into her ear. “You’re here to help, remember?”

“Someone want to tell me what’s going on before I start shouting and wake the kid?” Dean urged from behind gritted teeth. His hands clenched into fists at his sides. These were his friends – well, Benny was, anyway. He wasn’t going to go all ballistic on them.

Meg folded her lips together and glared at him before replying. “Sam turned his phone off as is standard procedure before starting a top-secret operation,” she explained in a smooth, “official” type of voice. “It’s standard procedure because that’s his personal phone. He uses it to contact his family, his friends, whatever. Someone could use those connections and that phone to somehow compromise the mission through the GPS.” 

Dean let that percolate through his mind. “That sounds made up,” he decided finally. “Is that made up? Because it sounds made up.”

“It’s not made up. If I felt like it I could figure out where Lisa’s new husband went on his lunch break today just by using your phone. But I’m not going to, because I couldn’t give less of a flying fuck. The issue with the phone, and the job, is that he didn’t need to leave for that job for another three days. He took off early because he was distraught after your call.” 

Distraught? Dean thought wildly, even as a little pit started to form in the middle of his stomach. Who even gets “distraught?" “Well I always used to tease him about being a big girl but that’s a little much don’t you think?”

“Awesome. Gendered insults on top of everything. You’re a piece of work, you know that, Dean? I just told you that you chased your brother out of town three days before he even left – that he literally left town three days early, just to get to someplace that you weren’t – and all you can think to do is to call him a girl. To a woman. Because you think being a woman is something to be ashamed of.” Benny put a hand on her back and moved it back and forth.

“Jesus, lady, learn to take a joke. Sammy’s always gone storming off when he gets upset. It’s what he does. I told him some things he didn’t want to hear and he didn’t like it.” Dean shook his head and made himself grab his bottle for a drink. He hoped he didn’t look too much like a robot. 

“Oh. Right. Would one of those things be the idea that he’s entirely replaceable at work, he has no skills that anyone else doesn’t have and they could put pretty much anyone in his job and no one would notice?” Meg’s dark eyes blazed and her cheeks burned. 

Dean swallowed his beer. “Those weren’t the words I used, but that’s the sentiment. I mean, come on. It’s Thanksgiving. It’s the first Thanksgiving he’s been allowed back and he’s going to blow it off to go do some shit anyone could do?”

Meg’s eyes bulged almost right out of her sockets. “First of all, no. No no no. The guy speaks ten languages fluently, not including English. No one can do that. I can’t do that. He’s a crack shot, we don’t have anyone better. He’s such a good hacker that the NSA has tried to get him to transfer over something like six times. He was specifically requested for this job, Dean. Because he’s the best. The absolute fucking best there is. They just don’t make better agents than Sam Fucking Winchester. Counterterrorism was sorry to lose me, but they got it. People burn out. They fought tooth and nail to keep him.” 

“Okay, but none of that overrides the family,” Dean spat back. “I mean, so what if he’s smart? He’s always been smart. He’d have been a great doctor if he’d done what he was supposed to. He needs to show his commitment to us, to his family. We need to know that he’s going to be there when we need him.”

“Like your father was?” Meg snapped back. “I mean, it was your father who cast him out to begin with, but it was your father who was always abandoning you to go wandering off into the jungle or the bush or whatever.” 

“Back off,” Dean demanded. “Dad was saving lives.” 

“And Sam saves lives every day. In different ways from you, it’s true, but he still saves lives.” She took a deep breath. “Look. I thought reuniting would be good for him. I really did. But now I just don’t. It’s hurting him and he’s making bad decisions as a result.”

“Oh, like what? Running off with hot chicks?”

“Please. Sam hasn’t even looked at a woman since Georgia. Or a man. Or anyone else. Dean, Sam volunteered for that job. Yes, he was specifically requested, but Jody had to approve the request and she wouldn’t have done so if Sam hadn’t asked to get out of town for a while. We’re going to lose him, Dean.”

“We’re not going to lose him,” Dean scoffed, even as the pit in his stomach grew bigger. “He’s only just moved here.”

“Counterterrorism wants him back in a big way. He was already down after Georgia and it was making him risky. The last time he went on one of these ‘special request’ trips he wound up in a cage for a good long time, getting tortured. But he’s taking on these ‘special request’ assignments again specifically because he needs to get some space from you!”

Dean stood up and walked over to the window. “Thirteen years wasn’t enough space for him?” he ground out, unable to look at either of them.

“That’s not it, smartass. You’re messing with his head and after everything he’s been through he can’t take it."

He couldn’t help but laugh. “Everything he’s been through. Right.”

Benny made a quizzical face at him. “What, the torture wasn’t enough?”

“Sorry, I mean I know you said something happened in Georgia. It’s just…he’s got a history of, uh, dramatics.” Dean took another drink and turned fully around. “I mean, I wasn’t there. You literally cannot blame what happened to him on me, and it doesn’t give him an excuse for not filling his obligations now.”

“For God’s sake, Dean, where do we start?” Meg cried, putting her beer down. “I mean, there’s what your father did to him, to both of you –”

“Watch it lady,” Dean growled.”

“There’s what you did to him,” she continued without missing a beat. “I mean, that screwed him up, Dean. Regardless of how you think he was the aggressor, it screwed him up. There’s nothing you can do about it now, but it screwed him up. There’s getting disowned. There’s what happened to his fiancée –”

“Fiancée?” Dean blurted. “Sammy was engaged?” “Yeah. She was murdered his senior year at Stanford. It’s what inspired him to go into the FBI, actually.” She sighed. “I didn’t know her. I did know Madison, who he dated while we were at Quantico. She died in a training accident. She was…” Meg softened a little. “She was something else, Dean. Smart, fearless, took no shit from anyone. She was just… she was.”

Dean hesitated. He couldn’t bring himself to mourn for either the nameless fiancée from Stanford or for Madison, but he could easily imagine the effect that losing them had had on Sammy. The kid got attached to string, for crying out loud. “Okay. So that…that probably sucked for him. Still doesn’t mean that he just gets to waltz back in like he’s not the one who walked out on us! On me!”

Benny smiled a little, like the cat that ate the canary. Meg just recoiled. “That’s really what you’re going with?” she objected. “He has to sacrifice his career, the only thing he actually has left, in order to have the chance to maybe someday be accepted back as a perpetual penitent by the family that never wanted him in the first place?”

“Hey – you’re the one who wanted him to take some time off, sister.”

“Look. This is the problem right here. I’m telling you that he literally went out to put his life at risk because he can’t figure out –”

Benny cleared his throat, a soft sound that cut through the arguing quickly. “If I may,” he interrupted, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, “maybe I can offer some perspective. As a disinterested party. I think, and this is second-hand obviously, that Sam is feeling unsettled because he’s not sure where he stands with you, Dean. He can’t tell what it is that you want. And that has him feeling a great deal of stress and anxiety.”

Dean groaned in frustration. “I’ve done everything you people have asked of me. I’ve reached out to him, I’ve let him hang out with Ben – against my better judgment – and I’ve spent time with him.” He flopped back into his chair. “What else can you want from me, for crying out loud?”

Benny nodded and bit the inside of his cheek. “How do you feel about the time you’ve spent with him?”

“What?”

“How do you feel about the time you’ve spent with your brother?” Benny repeated, slower and slicing his hand down on each syllable. “It’s a simple question. You’ve gone out with him several times now. How do you feel about the time you’ve spent?” 

Dean bit his tongue and shifted in his seat. “I’ve had fun. Okay?”

“Have you told Sam that?” The Cajun leaned back and put an arm around Meg. 

“What?” Dean made a face. “Do you want us to have a slumber party? Maybe braid that hair of his? Hey, Meg, how exactly does he get away with having that hair? It’s way past regulation length.”

“Quit deflecting, Dean. You’re better than that. Now, I know, because Sam has said this in my presence, that Sam has no idea why you keep ‘dragging me out’ like you do because it’s clear ‘he’s not getting much out of it.” Benny sighed. “He’s pretty sure you don’t want to be there, that you don’t want to be around him, that you don’t trust him. He knows you don’t trust him with Ben.”

“He thinks you think he’s going to corrupt Ben,” Meg spat, lips curled back from her teeth. “Like he’s going to do to Ben what you did to him.”

Dean’s stomach lurched. “God. No, no, it’s not like that. Jesus, what is wrong with that boy?” He massaged his temples. “I mean, yes. I do think he’s already encouraging Ben to be rebellious. Next thing you know Ben’s going to want to go to art school, or be a plumber or something.” 

“It’s Ben’s life,” Benny pointed out mildly. “He gets to do whatever he wants with it. I’m pretty sure Lisa and Matt, at least, would support him in whatever he chose.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. I mean, Winchesters grow up to be doctors. Save lives. That’s all there is to it. But I’d never suspect Sam of…oh God. No no no.” He looked at his guests. “God that kid is so screwed up.”

“He is,” Meg glared.

“Now you can’t pin it all on Dean, sugar,” Benny counseled. “Dean was a victim too. He shouldn’t have done what he did, but he grew up just as isolated as Sam did. He didn’t know better. He didn’t exactly have moral guidance.” Benny glanced up at Dean, who had risen to his feet again without even noticing that he’d done so. “Dean, what do you want from your brother?”

Meg stared at Dean as Dean’s jaw fell open and hung there for a moment. “I…I don’t know,” he had to admit. “I mean…”

“You still want him,” she surmised, shaking her head. “That’s why you’re running so hot and cold toward him. You still want him.”

“Shut up,” he ordered her, eyes burning hot with tears. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You do. You still think that you have a right to him after all this time. After all the damage you did to him.” 

Dean hadn’t ever decked a woman and he didn’t want to start now. He couldn’t afford to start now, but the urge was growing. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Come on, cher,” Benny directed, dragging Meg to her feet. “Let’s get back to my place. It’s a little more amenable anyway.”

Meg’s eyes never left his, not until Dean closed the door behind them.

Alone again, Dean poured himself a giant tumbler of bourbon. How dared she – how dared that woman, who barely even knew his Sammy – accuse him of having ‘damaged’ his brother? They hadn’t done anything wrong. They hadn’t. Sammy’d agreed to everything they’d done, eventually, and he’d enjoyed it. There was nothing wrong with enjoying sex. 

And the sex had always been separate from his feelings. It was for all of Dean’s partners. Dean had been devoted to his little brother until the day Sammy walked out that door and never came back. He’d shared the food with Sammy, stretching the food that they had. He’d made sure that Sammy was safe. He’d taught Sammy to read, how to write. He’d scrounged for clothes for the boy. He’d taught Sammy how to fight. 

Meg had no goddamn idea what the hell she was talking about with that damage crap.

But Sam was damaged, and badly. There were no two ways about that. 

What they’d done had been fun, and it had been some consolation for both of them. But it hadn’t been normal, and Sammy did get very attached. Maybe it had been difficult for him, not being able to be affectionate with the person he was attached to. And Dean had sometimes gotten a little twitchy about Sam forming the kind of relationships that Dean did, but that was for Sammy’s own good. They couldn’t go getting attached to outsiders, not with the life they’d led at the time. 

_Why are the rules any different for you than for me, Dean?_

Glass shattering, a nameless and faceless girl screaming, and Sammy bleeding on the floor.

He’d screwed up, maybe. He needed to talk to Sammy, maybe explain himself at least, when his brother got back from wherever the hell he was. 


	8. God I'm Tired, Can I Take A Break

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Christmas is the happiest time of year for families, right?

The flight attendant offered to help Sam up out of his seat, but that was kind of an exercise in absurdity. He was literally fifteen inches taller than she was and probably something like twice her weight; if he turned out to actually need more support than the ugly cane the hospital made him take provided he’d crush her like a bug. Instead he smiled and told her that he’d be fine, and gingerly pulled himself to a standing position. He did let her get his bag from the overhead bin, though.

About the only good thing about flying injured – and it was truly the only good thing – was that he got to be the first one off the plane. He could feel the hostility of his fellow travelers as they watched him shuffle toward the door. They all had places to go, connections to make, families to catch up with; who was this giant asshole to be cutting in line so to speak? So what if he had a cane, plenty of people had canes. At least he knew that none of them were going to shoot him for it. That was some comfort, at least.

He didn’t think he’d ever moved as slowly as he did getting down the ramp to the gate. It’s just your perception, he reminded himself, for the fiftieth time since the successful conclusion of the operation in Washington. As soon as the stitches healed he’d be right back in the saddle. The injury hadn’t even been all that bad; a minor stab wound, more of a cut than anything else. It hadn’t even hit any organs, just bled a lot. Not that the insignificance of the injury would even remotely stop Meg from fussing.

She was at the gate when it opened, lurking at the barely-open door like the face of vengeance itself. She wasn’t supposed to be, of course, but the badge meant you could get away with a lot of things. Her pretty face was screwed up into an expression of profound disapproval and she stood with one hand on an airport-supplied wheelchair. Their eyes met, and she raised one eyebrow. 

He stopped. “No. Hell no.”

“Doctor’s orders, pretty boy,” she smirked. 

“I don’t have a doctor,” he pointed out, leaning on the cane.

“Technically you do. Dr. Roberts is on your insurance as your primary care physician because you weren’t filling out the paperwork and I had to list someone. Golden opportunity there, Sam. This particular piece of advice comes from Dr. Matt Freeman.” She gestured to the seat. 

“Matt? You went to Ben’s stepdad?” His stomach lurched and he reached out to balance himself against the wall. “Seriously, Meg?” He stepped aside so the people behind him wouldn’t be impeded by their domestic debate.

“Technically no, I did not. Ben, on the other hand, did. He was extremely concerned for you, Sam. He loves you.”

“How did he even hear that I was hurt?” Sam marveled. “Jeez, a kid that young didn’t need to know that.” The poor kid really didn’t need that kind of anxiety in his life. Sam remembered it all too well.

“Oh. He heard his mom talking with me about it.” She pointed imperiously toward the seat again and stamped her foot. “Butt. Seat. Now.” 

“I am not having you wheel me through the airport like some kind of centenarian, Meg. I’m thirty-one. I don’t need to be pushed through the airport.” He shook his head and immediately regretted it. 

“Sam! Just sit. It’s going to be fine. Relax. You’ve earned a little time off. Starting now. Don’t make a scene or I’ll point out that you have a gun.” She smiled sweetly.

He opened his mouth and shut it again. She would do that, too. It wouldn’t be a problem, not really – he was an agent, for crying out loud, he had a permit and his badge and everything – but it would draw a lot of attention and cause a lot of panic. “I’m so getting you back for this.”

“Keep complaining and I’ll take pictures, hotcakes.” She patted him on the head as he settled into the uncomfortable fake leather. “Now come on. I happen to have been previously informed about the shot to the leg too, or did you think you were the only one in the office with unique sources of information?”

“What, you didn’t get Ben to call the ER in Bellingham?” Sam groused. 

“No. Matt called them all by himself. And Lisa dropped off a whole bunch of containers of turkey soup. And books.” She started to push him through the crowd as Sam cradled his bag and his laptop bag. 

God, he could just feel all the stares, all the judgment. He wasn’t doing enough; he wasn’t hurt bad enough to merit a wheelchair damn it. He certainly shouldn’t be having a woman half his size push him through the airport like this. He wasn’t that badly off, he didn’t even really need the cane. What kind of a piece of trash was he, that he was expecting Meg to swoop in and save him like this? “Soup?”

“Yes, it’s what happens when you put things in broth. She made a bunch of it with leftover turkey and the carcass and whatever after Thanksgiving so don’t get your discs spinning about how she should have been doing something else with her time. She already had it made up and frozen, just so it wouldn’t go to waste. And now it won’t.”

His shoulders relaxed, somewhat mollified. “So why exactly did you go bringing it up to her again?”

She paused, just long enough that Sam knew that something was up. “Ben’s excited that you’re coming back,” she said then. “He was really hoping to see you for the holiday, although he gets why you weren’t there.” 

Sam very strongly doubted that his nephew understood why Sam hadn’t been there. Sam himself didn’t understand fully why he hadn’t been there. “Alright. That’s…I mean I’m sorry to disappoint him, but –”

“The kid thinks you’re the hottest thing since shoes were invented, Sam.” 

“Bet that makes Dean real happy,” he blurted out. He could speak in front of Meg, relatively freely anyway. 

“He’s concerned,” she admitted. “Lisa’s not. Lisa would like for you to come around more often. Have dinner with her and Ben and Matt. That way Ben gets to spend some time with you on a more regular, predictable basis.” 

Sam had visions of Dean turning red before transforming into his final volcanic form. “I don’t see Dean taking that well. Not even a little bit.” 

“He can’t raise a stink without causing himself a whole lot of problems, Sam. Anyway, try to think about it. She’s trying to give Ben what’s best for him, you know?” 

Sam slumped, which tugged on the stitches in his side but he didn’t pay much attention. Somehow he strongly doubted that increasing contact with him was in the boy’s best interests, but he wasn’t going to get through to her right now by saying that. Instead he lapsed into silence until they got to the car, which Benny had waiting for them at the front door. He had to admit that he liked the quick service. He wouldn’t have minded a little more privacy, but he kicked himself for the thought as soon as it popped into his head. Benny had come all this way to do him a favor and save him the expense of a taxi. Benny made Meg happy. He did not have the right to resent any loss of privacy. It was for him to be grateful for the favor done. 

He made small talk on the way back to the townhouse, let Meg bundle him into bed ( _I know you never sleep on planes, Sam, come on._ ) She set him up with a shiny new bed tray that he could reach easily, his laptop, his phone, his tablet, some books, a bottle of water, his cane and the promise that she’d wake him up a reasonable amount of time before Jody came to discuss coming back to work. 

Much to his surprise, he was able to sleep in those few hours. The mission had been grueling, but joint tasks usually were. At least this one had been (mostly) on US soil, dealing with some IS recruiters who had fled Britain and who were hopping the border between Washington and British Columbia like some kind of hopscotch game. They’d had some close calls, and Sam had never liked working with Campbell’s MI-6 contact, Crowley, but they’d gotten everyone in the end. They’d taken them alive, too, and on Canadian soil so no trips to Cuba. 

He almost thought that Crowley seemed disappointed by that. 

True to her word, Meg came and woke him when Jody was about half an hour out, giving him time to shower and try to look more human. His supervisor came up to his room to speak with him, looking around the space with narrowed eyes and tight lips. She relaxed when she saw him, propped up on the pillows and with his leg elevated. “Sam,” she chided, pulling out the one chair. “I believe my orders were to come back in one piece.” 

He made himself grin. “I’m still in one piece, ma’am. That piece just needs a little help staying together at the moment, but I’ll be fine in like a week. The doc was great; these shouldn’t even scar.” 

“Awesome. A week? Then we shouldn’t see you around the office for a week.” She put her hands on her hips and tilted her head at him. He supposed it was a “mom” look; he’d never experienced something like that first-hand, but he’d seen them on television. 

“Please don’t,” he begged. “I can’t just…not work. I have no idea what I’d do with myself.” Oh, he knew what he’d do with himself all right. He’d sit there and think about his brother until his brain completely melted down. Letting his supervisor in on that tidbit seemed like a seriously career limiting move. 

“You could try moving into your room when you can move around a little bit better,” she suggested. “Try to make it look a little more like you live here instead of like some safe house you’re going to bug out of at a moment’s notice. I mean you’ve been here since what, the end of August?”

“Something like that,” he muttered. 

“At least go buy some curtains, maybe?” She sighed. “So. How is it that you’re the only one who got hurt on this junket?”

He shook his head. “Just lucky, I guess.” Someone had to go take out the gunman, and Sam had volunteered. Campbell had a family, a whole clan to guide and support. Crowley had….something, a son, or so Sam thought he remembered. Sam was the best candidate to take that chance, so he’d jumped in. It just made the most sense at the time. 

“Well. You’re taking the week off, and you’re going to come back healthy and in good shape to tackle the rest of your caseload.” She smiled at him. “You deserve some rest, Sam. You’ve earned it.” 

He offered her a dry little chuckle. “I can rest when I’m dead, Jody,” he told her.

She didn’t look entertained or reassured by that. Not the way that she should have.

Matt and Lisa both came by to check on him, which was both weird and sweet. On the one hand it felt distressingly like pity and he hated pity. He didn’t need pity, he hadn’t had connections other than Meg for years and he’d done just fine. On the other hand, they’d taken all of this time out of their day just to look in on him and check up on him. And they genuinely seemed happy to see him, both of them did. It had been a long time since anyone had wanted to be around him, and he’d forgotten what it felt like. 

He shouldn’t get used to it. It could all get ripped away at any moment. Dean could put his foot down and forbid contact with Ben. Lisa and Matt could realize what Sam was, and cut him out. They could simply grow bored with him – it wasn’t like he had a lot of vitality left to offer, nothing to add sparkle to a party or brighten up the dinnertime conversation the way someone else could. 

He still appreciated the visit, and enjoyed it while it lasted. Matt pronounced the Bellingham doctors’ work “excellent,” and declared that he should be back at work by the end of the next week with no problems if he took it easy. “Shouldn’t be too hard, right?” he chuckled. “I mean, it’s a pretty nice set-up you’ve got here. Arlington’s got it all, right? Restaurants, a movie theater, shopping.” 

Sam dimly remembered that discussion with Meg, back before they decided on a town when they moved. Back then the matter had been of minimal interest because he’d figure it out when he got to Boston, and he didn’t think he’d have the time to explore anyway. Now he just didn’t plan to leave the house much. What was the point, really? 

His week of exile gave him time to do some Christmas shopping, at least, but he didn’t venture outside to make use of the many excellent local shops Arlington had to offer. He didn’t even leave his room, choosing instead to do all of his shopping online. He got toys for Ben from a place in Palo Alto he and Jess used to get toys for her nieces from – they always carried a quality product, and they’d always said that if they ever decided to have children they’d get all their toys from that place. He got books for Ben from a place near Quantico; they offered books in both English and French. He got a string of pearls for Lisa and one for Meg from a jeweler in Virginia, a little old man who had survived the Holocaust and still worked every day with a huge smile on his face because he found something beautiful to counter all of the ugliness he’d seen. He got Matt a fancy, leather-bound copy of the complete work of Langston Hughes, because he’d mentioned that Hughes was his favorite poet. Benny was a little harder – he ultimately settled on a very nice chef’s knife, because he knew the psychiatrist liked to cook, although somehow he didn’t think any member of the Bureau could ever feel comfortable encouraging someone in Benny’s profession to take up cookery. Adam got a shirt; Sam barely paid attention since he knew Adam would just throw it away. Dean…Sam wanted to wrap up the world and stick it under a tree. At the same time he wanted to rig up an explosive device and put it next to the first present. Instead, he got Dean new golf clubs. 

And then Sam stared at the ceiling. Being away for a few weeks had been intended to help him sort out his feelings and his needs with regards to Dean, and he supposed that had happened to some extent. He couldn’t help but want Dean. Dean had, literally, taught him all of his sexual responses. Maybe if they’d had contact after the breakup, if they’d been brothers after they stopped being lovers, he could have learned to stop wanting him. At the moment, as things stood, it wasn’t possible. 

It had been the absolute worst possible time for Dean to come back into his life. He’d been recovering from everything that happened in Georgia, and maybe he’d been ready to start thinking about reaching out to someone again. The thought had been there, but so had the trauma. And then…well, and then Dean. 

Kind of summed up his life, really. “And then Dean.” They could put it on his tombstone.

The funny thing was that, like always, it didn’t matter that he wanted Dean. It hadn’t mattered back when they were kids ( _I don’t know, Dean. We’re brothers!_ ) and it hadn’t mattered when he’d left ( _You can come with me, no one needs to know that we’re brothers._ ) and it didn’t matter now. Dean was over him, had moved past the mistakes they’d made because they hadn’t had anyone to teach them better. And that was good, it was right, it was what Sam had been trying to do for thirteen years. 

Maybe it would be best if he left Boston. He liked the office, he liked working for Jody. He hated the idea of separating from Meg, the one person who truly knew him. And the selfish part of him didn’t want to leave the facsimile family he’d built up around himself, fleeting and possibly artificial as it might be. At the same time, being here, in such close proximity to Dean, was killing him. 

It wasn’t just that Dean had moved on. He wanted Dean to move on. It wasn’t just that Dean had no room in his life for his fuck-up little brother, his fucked-up little brother. It wasn’t just that Dean still saw Sam’s disobedience as the ultimate betrayal, of their mother and of their father and of Dean himself. 

It was that Dean truly believed that Sam owed something to the family that had turned their backs on him, that had moved on and moved away and showed him so clearly that he was literally the least valued carrier of the set of genes marked Winchester. It was that Dean blamed Sam for what had happened between them, thought himself to be a victim of Sam when Sam had been nothing but a boy going to his brother for advice and help.

In Dean’s world, Sam was the villain. Sam couldn’t fix that, he couldn’t get around that. He shouldn’t want to. Maybe he was the villain. He hadn’t sought Dean out, he hadn’t wanted Dean in that way, but maybe he’d done something unconsciously, something to set Dean off. His father had certainly thought so. Maybe he did owe something to the Winchester family, but it wasn’t attendance at a holiday dinner so that they could all sit there and sneer at him about how he’d walked away. 

Maybe he owed them his absence. 

The longer he sat in his room, alone, the more convinced he became that a withdrawal was the best solution for everyone. Ben would be upset, but they could Skype or something and he’d get over it. The family had thrived the last time he’d left. It had been the best gift he could have given them. Counterterrorism would take him back in a heartbeat. Sure, the jobs were more dangerous, but so what? He wasn’t doing anything with his life; he was a complete waste of space. Why shouldn’t the guy who would be the least missed take the risks and let the people with families be the ones to stay safe? 

It would be some time before he could officially transfer. In the meantime, he could take on everything that the Boston office had to offer. It would keep his mind off things – off Dean – and he could be productive while not noticing his loneliness. He kept himself available for Ben, when Ben wanted him, but for the most part the rest of his time was spent on work. He worked out as much as he was able, although he noticed that his most recent injuries weren’t healing the way he expected them to. Whatever. They were stitched; it wasn’t like he was going to bleed out on the carpet or something. 

He rose early to run. He went to work after that, and he usually worked through lunch. He worked late if he wasn’t going to go see Ben, and he brought work home with him. Sure he was tired, but the work was there and he was getting things done. That was important, right? The mountain of paperwork was getting whittled down, sleepless night by sleepless night, and Sam got to feel useful. Jody looked happy about that, at least, although Sam couldn’t pretend he didn’t see her whispering with Meg. 

Sam didn’t spend a lot of time with Meg. She had Benny, and he was going to be leaving anyway. He wasn’t avoiding them, exactly. Not entirely. He just didn’t want to bring them down with all of his moping, being a black hole that sucked the joy out of everything like he’d been since the day he was born. 

He buckled down and focused right up through Christmas. He hadn’t planned to do much about the holiday. He didn’t usually bother even decorating and neither did Meg, which was why he was surprised to find a wreath on the door about a week before the holiday and a conifer in the living room. Benny and Meg invited him to stay and decorate it with him, but he pled work and hid in his room. 

If they exchanged looks with each other as he limped toward the stairs, Sam didn’t stay to discuss it with them.

Christmas day came, and he found that his attendance was expected at Lisa’s for Christmas dinner. He hesitated; he didn’t want to do this. He had hated the holiday as a child. Jess had loved it so he’d grudgingly tolerated it while they were together, but after her death he found he could barely tolerate the slightest jingle of a bell. And he’d managed to completely avoid Dean since his return from Washington – clearly the desire to avoid was mutual. He didn’t want a scene. Still, when Ben had gotten onto the phone to specifically add his own pleas to the invitation Sam couldn’t in good conscience resist. So he agreed, and at the appropriate time he got into his car and he drove it on down to Brookline. 

Sam hadn’t been feeling well all day, maybe a little dizzy and lightheaded. He chalked it up to fatigue or maybe hunger – he hadn’t been keeping track of his intake, with everything that had been going on, and he’d be the first to admit that he’d never been on the best of terms with either food or sleep. But he couldn’t miss the dinner, which should help to solve at least one of the problems anyway, so he accepted the warm embraces from both Matt and Lisa as the door opened and the delighted enthusiasm of Ben when he stepped indoors. They’d been joined, as expected, by Dean, who stared intently but said nothing. A pretty young woman who vaguely resembled Lisa was introduced as Lisa’s sister Janette; she blushed and waved. Adam was there, of course, with a dark-skinned girl who was introduced as Maryann. Neither said anything to Sam and Adam’s lip curled. Matt had a brother and a sister in attendance as well, Mark and Martha, with their spouses and their children. All in all it was a good thing that the dining room was huge; Sam didn’t think he’d be able to fit half this many people in the townhouse in Arlington. 

The food was plentiful, of course. Lisa was a charming hostess, and she made sure that everyone’s plate was piled high with good things. Unfortunately for Sam, that included him. There was roast beef, mashed potatoes made with the very best cream you could get in Boston, buttery green beans almandine, creamed spinach, some kind of cheese pie… seemingly thousands of rich, filling dishes that would never be served together except on a holiday table. His stomach turned even thinking about it. His stomach couldn’t handle that. His stomach couldn’t handle even half of that. He picked at his food and made conversation with Ben, who sat on his left side, and with Janette, who sat on his right. When the time for clearing the dishes came he made sure he helped, so Lisa didn’t notice and wasn’t offended. 

Dessert was richer still, with a decadent chocolate mousse cake that apparently Martha had made and a pecan pie, because that was still Dean’s favorite after all these years. Sam never could get the hang of pecan pie; it was just too much sugar in one place, but he was spared having to eat it. Ben leaned into him and whispered into his ear, “I don’t like pecan pie either.” 

After dessert came the inevitable gift exchange. Lisa gasped over her necklace, Matt was thrilled with his book, Ben exclaimed over his gifts (which Lisa insisted were “too much, Sam,” but she was smiling and shaking her head fondly when she said it so he figured he was okay with it), and even Dean said “thanks, Sammy,” for his golf clubs. Adam ignored his present, put it by the side of his chair and didn’t even open it, but whatever. Sam had expected more or less that same reaction, so he didn’t much care. 

Ben gave him two gifts: a new tie, which he’d presumably gotten one or another of his parents to pay for, and a carved wooden Christmas tree, which he proudly told his uncle that he’d made himself. That got a genuine smile out of Sam and he hugged the boy close to him; it was nice to be so loved. Lisa and Matt gave him a membership to a yoga studio in Arlington where Lisa was friends with the owner; the place was very reputable and she could vouch for the practice. Dean got him a pair of cufflinks. 

After gifts were exchanged Ben wanted to show off all of the toys “Santa” had brought him, which Sam surprised himself by kind of enjoying. Ben was a privileged child, being the child of two doctors and a yoga instructor who came from money, but he seemed to truly appreciate what he had explained the purpose of each toy with an earnestness that made Sam’s heart just melt. His favorite gift was a little build-a-robot kit that his uncle Mark had given him. He couldn’t wait to sit down and figure it out. 

The room seemed uncomfortably warm to Sam, and he couldn’t help but notice that Ben seemed to be chilled. “Are you feeling okay?” he asked the boy as his stomach lurched. 

“I’m fine, Uncle Sam. Are you okay? You don’t look so good. You’re kind of gray.” He put a hand on Sam’s arm. “I’m going to go get Dad or Matt.” He ran out of the room, even as Sam groaned out an objection. 

By the time Ben and Matt – with Dean in tow, the day kept getting better – came back to the room, Sam was leaning against the wall. Sweat ran down his face and he could hear that his own breathing was ragged. “Christ, Sammy,” Dean scowled, as Matt approached with a thermometer. 

“You’ve got a fever of a hundred and four, Sam,” the orthopedist frowned. “Let me take a look at those wounds.”

“Wounds?” Dean objected, turning to look at his son’s stepfather with raised eyebrows. “Sammy’s got ‘wounds’ now? What the hell?” He turned to face Sam again. “Where’d you go picking up injuries this time, Sammy? Huh? Just accident prone?”

Sam glared at his brother as he pulled up his shirt. Ben closed the door to the room behind them and went to go rejoin the party. “This isn’t the time or the place, Dean.”

“This stab wound is infected,” Matt pointed out. “And badly. I don’t understand. You should be almost completely healed by now; you got these almost a month ago. Is the gunshot wound on your leg in a similar condition?”

Sam shrugged. “I guess. I don’t pay much attention to it.” He fought to keep his dinner down. “Look, it’s okay. I’ll be fine, just let me rest for a minute.”

Dean flushed red. “You’ve had these injuries for a month and you just figured you’d let it slide? Jesus Christ, Sammy.”

Sam bit his lip. Now Dean cared? But their personal dramas couldn’t be allowed to ruin the family holiday. “I’ve been busy.”

Dean’s eyes narrowed. “You his attending?”

“I’m his friend, and I took a look at the wounds when he got back from that job at the beginning of the month.” Matt glared at Dean. “The wounds were fine then. I’m going to prescribe a cefazolin type of antibiotic, which should clear things up for you. I’d like to admit you, because I don’t like the fever and you don’t look like you’ve slept in a good month. But I’m not going to, because I’m an orthopedist and that will just get messy.” He sighed. “Will you please take the full course of the antibiotic, Sam?”

Sam sighed. Doctors always talked you like you had two brain cells to rub together. “Yes. I will.”

“Alright. I’ll take him home, Matt,” Dean sighed, grabbing his keys from his pocket.

“I have my own car, Dean. I can drive myself.”

“No. No, you can’t, because no one here’s going to take the risk of you passing out and wrecking your car. I’ll drive your car and catch a ride home in a taxi or something but you’re going home, and you’re getting a ride there.”

“I hate to say it but he’s right,” Matt agreed. You’re in no condition to drive.” 

And so Sam found himself in the passenger seat of his car, riding in silence while Dean seethed in silence. They stopped at a twenty-four hour pharmacy to fill Matt’s prescription, which was likewise done in silence, and they continued back up to Arlington.

He expected Dean to just drop him off out front, as was normal when someone just gave someone a ride home, but that wasn’t what happened. Dean followed him to the door and forced his way inside. Sam could feel his pulse in his ears. “What are you doing?”

“Making sure you take your medicine, Sammy. Clearly you need someone looking after you since you’re sure as hell not looking after yourself. I mean, seriously? You let yourself go so much wounds that should have been fine got infected and probably have been for a month. Come on, let’s get you upstairs and settled into bed.” His beautiful face was screwed into an almost simian expression of fury.

“No.” His voice sounded raspy even to him, and he walked into the kitchen.

“What did you just say to me?” Dean bellowed, following Sam into the small space. 

“No. I said no. I’m not going upstairs with you, you’re not ‘tucking me into bed,’ you’re not putting your hands on me, we’re not…we’re not doing this.” He grabbed a glass of water and filled it, sagging against the counter for support. “My room is my space, Dean.”

His brother composed his face. “Yeah, well, you forwent any right to privacy when you decided to neglect yourself until your wounds wouldn’t freaking heal. You got those injuries on that assignment you took when you decided you’d rather go play cops and robbers than be with your family for Thanksgiving, didn’t you?”

Sam took the first pill of the three-week cycle. “So?” he asked before washing it down with the water. 

“Jesus Christ, Sammy! What the hell is the matter with you!” I’m saying that those should have healed weeks ago and now they’re gonna scar!” He pounded on the counter for emphasis.

Sam shrugged. “What’s one more?”

“Oh would you quit it with the ‘poor little Sammy’ trip already? You really think starving yourself and not sleeping is going to do something for you? Make us somehow feel sorry for you, maybe somehow make me and Adam ‘see the light’ and undo the fact that you abandoned us?” He gave a low little laugh. “Yeah, I know. Meg and Jody see that you haven’t been eating, haven’t been sleeping. They feel bad. I know better. I know all about how you like to play on people’s heartstrings.”

“Fuck off, Dean,” Sam growled. 

“No. I won’t. No one’s coming to save you, Sam. This is it. I gave you your space. You ignored my calls after you got back, I took the hint, but you don’t get to walk away and think I’m going to sit here and chase after you. You think you’re some kind of victim here, Sam –”

“Dude. You forced yourself on your little brother,” Sam snarled. “I was eleven.”

“You were willing!” Dean yelled back.

“I said no!” Sam retorted.

“Sure, at first,” Dean scoffed. “You came around. You always came around. You loved every minute of it. And then you turned around and you walked away like it was nothing! You were everything to me!”

“I was nothing to you!” Sam screamed. He hoped that the neighbors were all someplace else for the night, because he really didn’t need the cops getting called. “I was your goddamn pet,” he seethed. “You got to screw around with anyone in a skirt but you expected me to get down on my knees for you, and only for you, anytime you couldn’t find anything better. Your rules were always different for me.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“When I tried to get some normalcy, to have a relationship with someone who wasn’t my brother, you put me through the window,” Sam spat. “Remember that? And Dad made me take that shard out of my shoulder myself.” 

“That’s not what happened. We were just horsing around, things got out of hand,” Dean insisted. 

“Bullshit, Dean. And you know it. And you know what? Dad knew. Dad fucking knew. Sat me down when I was all of fourteen and he told me that he knew what you were doing to me and that he didn’t care, because at least you were happy. That at least I was capable of bringing happiness to one person’s life since I’d destroyed everyone else’s.” He bit his cheek. He should stop himself now, but he could no more do that than he could stop a volcano from erupting. “Said that was all I was good for anyway. And that’s the man you think that I should have blindly obeyed.” 

Dean’s eyes shone. “No. No he didn’t. You’re deluded. You need help.” 

“Believe what you want. I literally don’t care. But you’re sitting here and holding me leaving against me, and you think I should have stayed to hear that? But you would, wouldn’t you? It was never about me. It was always about you, and Dad. I left so I could find someplace where I was going to be important to someone.”

Dean sneered. “How’s that working out for you there, ace?” He turned on his heel and walked away.


	9. Too Much Talk, Too Much Wasted Breath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean tries to walk away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains a scene with a hostage situation involving a school. This may be triggering/disturbing to some readers, who may wish to skip it.

Dean shook with rage as he left the little townhouse. How was that for a Christmas present, huh? A fist full of lies from the brother he’d once adored. The brother he still adored, even though he shouldn’t. How dared Sam stand there and blame Dean for something that had been so good for both of them, had made them both so much happier in the constant upheaval that had been their lives? How could he honestly sit there and say that he hadn’t wanted it and in the same breath complain about Dean’s flings with other women? 

The kid had problems, probably shouldn’t have a gun or a badge. He belonged in a facility. He should talk to Benny and get him the help he needed. 

He went outside and called a cab, watching Sam’s oversized shadow stalk through the house on its way upstairs. At least he was planning to go upstairs and get some damn rest. Maybe it was sleep deprivation that was making him feel this way. That could cause all kinds of problems, sure enough. Maybe he’d be more rational once he caught up on his sleep.

The cab showed up quickly, glad of work on such a night. Dean simmered in anger all the way back to Lisa’s house, where he forced himself to smile and play nice for Ben’s benefit. The last thing he needed was a scene. Sam had already tried to wreck Christmas for him with that little slander against their father. He wasn’t going to wreck anyone else’s too. 

He saw Benny the next day. The psychiatrist had gone up to Andover with Meg for the holiday, to spend it with her family. “I’ve got to tell you, brother,” Benny admitted, shaking his head and laughing. “I can see why she ran off to Quantico. Her daddy might be the devil himself. A big-name demon at the very least.” 

Dean grinned. At least someone was happy. “Well, I’m sure he still sees her as his baby girl, you know? He’s not going to be too happy about some Southern dude coming along and nosing around, you know?”

“And why not? I’ll have you know that I’m a perfect gentleman.” His smile was lupine. “I only bite if asked. Now why don’t you tell me why you’ve got your poo face on, Winchester?”

“A poo face? What are we, four?” Dean stepped into the office and closed the door behind himself. 

“Well, I could ask you about why you look like Santa shat down your chimney but I didn’t think that was exactly becoming of a magna cum laude from Tulane.” Benny gave a bright, bland smile and folded his hands together in front of his laptop. “Let me guess. The prodigal son continues to disappoint.” 

“He insulted Dad, Benny. I mean, yeah. He continues to disappoint.” He felt his gorge rise and fought it down. “I’m having some concerns about his mental health.”

Benny pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “I’ve got a lot of concerns about Sam’s mental health, if I’m being honest. What’s got you suddenly taking an interest?”

Dean stepped back a bit at the judgment in the statement. “Suddenly? He’s my brother, Benny. Of course I’m interested. But, uh, anyway. Last night he was talking all kinds of crazy. I mean, he had a hundred and four degree fever, I guess his injuries – from that thing he did a month ago, can you believe? – haven’t healed and they got infected.”

“Well, he ain’t been sleeping and he ain’t been eatin’,” the psychiatrist shrugged. “I don’t know what he expected. So you’re concerned about the fact that his depression has gotten so bad that he’s decided to forgo the basics of self-care and lose himself in his work so severely?”

Dean frowned. “No, Benny. I know why he’s doing that. He wants someone to come along and save him. But he said some things. Awful things.” 

Benny bit his lip. “Like what?”

“Well, he said that he hadn’t wanted to do…the things we did. Hadn’t wanted to be with me. That, uh, Dad had told him that all he was good for was pleasing me sexually since he’d ‘killed the joy in everyone else’s life,’ or some shit like that. I mean, he really believes it.” 

“And you don’t.” 

“No, Benny,” Dean laughed. “Come on, that’s ridiculous. Sure he wasn’t exactly Mr. Warm and Fuzzy but he wouldn’t say anything like that to Sammy. He wanted to keep us safe. He never wanted Sam to date at all.” Dean froze. “That’s just a coincidence,” he objected, meeting Benny’s eyes. “He wanted us to be safe, and Sam was always getting into some situation or other. He just wanted to minimize the damage.” 

“I see.” Benny scratched the side of his head. “I know that you remember your relationship with Sam as being very positive, and very loving, Dean. Can you try to remember how Sam felt about it?” 

“He loved it.” Dean didn’t have to think about it.

“Did he? Or did he just give in?” Benny sighed. “Think about the things he’s telling you now. Think about how your father behaved toward him.” 

“He was tough, but he was fair.” Dean sat down in the chair across from his friend. “He never disciplined Sam when Sammy wasn’t out of line.” He swallowed. All that time when Dean had gone away to college, Adam had been relatively content with John. Not shiningly happy, but he’d been able to buckle down and do his homework and learn and adapt.

Sammy never had. Every teacher, every tutor, had always called Sammy a brilliant boy, a genius. John had called him slow, feeble-minded, dim. The schools and the little old ladies in the villages, and even some of the local men who didn’t usually pay attention to small children, would express concern about how underweight Sam was and bring him to their homes and try to shovel food into him. John had called him fat.

“He called him a cocksucker,” Dean remembered before his brain-to-mouth filter kicked in. “He used to call him ‘cocksucker,’ and I’d laugh. I thought ‘if only he knew.’”

“Yeah. I’m gonna go with Sam on this one,” Benny declared, bouncing a pencil into the air. “He’s not delusional, he’s not engaging in revisionist history. Your father felt very differently about him than he felt about you, and he was willing to let you do whatever you wanted to Sam if it meant keeping you close instead of intervening when he should have.” 

Dean sighed. “But he said I never cared about him, Benny. That he was only ever a pet to me. How am I…I mean, that’s not true. That was never true. He was the most…he was everything. Except Dad, he was all I had.” He hung his head and tugged at his hair. “I just don’t know where he gets these ideas from.”

“Obviously he didn’t feel particularly cherished. You’ve told me yourself that you weren’t exclusive, although it was expected of him. You told me yourself that you couldn’t be demonstrative even if you’d wanted to be, because he was your brother. You chose your father over him, so you can’t claim that as evidence for him. Why would he believe you?”

“He just has to, okay?” Dean stood up and started pacing. “He just…he has to. He has to understand.”

“Did you even call him when he left?”

“No! I couldn’t. It wasn’t allowed. And I was mad, all right? I was mad. He quit. He dumped me!” Dean pointed at the window, as though somehow the view of Roxbury might encompass his brother. “He can’t have loved me if he was willing to walk away.”

“Even after everything he was willing for you to come with him, so I think you know that’s not the case.” Benny shook his head. “Whatever, Dean. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter.” 

“Why not?”

The Cajun shook his head. “Because you two clearly can’t be around each other. You still blame him for leaving and he’s too…I guess damaged. I think he’s given up, Dean. Now I’m not exactly his confidant, but what I’m seeing when I see Sam is not a man with a lot of hope.” 

“Sammy’s fine,” Dean scoffed, waving his hand. “He gets like this. It is always a plea for attention.”

“And has he ever gotten it?”

“Well no, I mean that would just en…” Dean shut up. “I fucked up.” He told the story of the fight he’d had with Sam last night, feeling sicker with each passing word. 

Before he even finished speaking Benny had his phone out, texting. He got a response back almost immediately. “Well, the good news is that your brother is alive and in the office. The bad news is that he hasn’t said anything to anyone, and I mean not even the girl at the coffee kiosk, beyond the minimum necessary. I would strongly advise against showing your face around him again, Dean. Meg will shoot you.” 

“I’ve got to get him back, Benny. I’ve got to tell him –” He cut himself off, unable to finish the sentence. 

“What you’ve got to do is put your brother first.” His words were harsh, but his tone was kind and gentle. “He needs help, but let Meg be that help. Let Lisa and Matt be that help. Let Ben be that help, let me do it. You need to stay away.” 

Dean left the office in distress, but he soon calmed himself. This was temporary. He would still see Sam at Ben’s events, if from a distance, and he would hear updates about him from their acquaintances in common. He settled into a routine of work, social life and home life that had him feeling more cheerful quickly.

And he did hear about Sam. His best source, in terms of volume anyway, was Ben. Ben heard from his uncle on a regular basis after all, and saw him at least every other week. Of course what he learned was less helpful. Sam was the absolute best at soccer; he was also better at math than anyone even the teacher, and Sam could build a robot that could take over the world. Uncle Sam and Uncle Mark were going to take him skiing over winter break. Where the hell had Sammy learned to ski?

Matt had more germane information, although he was stingy with parting with it. Dean didn’t think he’d ever been more irritated by doctor-patient confidentiality. “The antibiotics are having the desired effect,” he confirmed. “I’m confident that he’ll make a full recovery.” 

“How does he seem otherwise?” Dean insisted. “Like, happy? Sad? Hulking green rage monster?” 

“Last time I checked there isn’t a cefazolin variant that contains gamma radiation, but I’ll be sure to check that out for you.” Matt rolled his eyes and Dean took a moment to appreciate his forbearance. He didn’t think he’d be able to put up with so much crap from his wife’s ex. 

He tried to call Sam a few times himself, because he was a grown up, but the number wouldn’t go through. He stopped trying after a while. He guessed maybe the feds could block a number, why not? And maybe, just maybe, if the feds couldn’t maybe one fed could.

Weeks turned into months, and the promised winter break came and went. Ben went skiing with his uncles, accompanied by Mark’s family. According to Ben, Sam was the “best skier in the world, he should be in the Olympics.” Matt conveyed more restrained praise, saying that everyone had enjoyed themselves and that his brother had even helped an injured skier down off the mountain. 

March came, and still Dean had no contact with Sam. Confidence gave way, as it was wont to do when Sam was concerned, to anger. Maybe Sam hadn’t left town, but he’d walked away from Dean again. Rather than stay and fight and work things out and try to be brothers (lovers) again, he’d decided to turn his back on the brother who loved him. Typical.

He stopped trying. He stopped asking about Sam, and when people asked him he was frank in telling them that he hadn’t seen or heard from Sammy since Christmas. Preparations began for Adam’s reception as a resident at Boston General, and Dean tried to focus on the brother who had stayed. It wasn’t the same – wasn’t even close to the same, God no – but it was probably healthier and definitely more productive. 

He let himself start dating, too. His heart wasn’t exactly in it, but he wasn’t some cloistered monk. Never had been. Sam had cut him out, and Dean was going to move on with his life. Why would he restrict himself from that kind of pleasure? At least he knew that Sonia and Felicia and Clara weren’t being ordered by his damn father to “please” him. Christ. Nobody got too attached; nobody expected monogamy and everyone had a good time.

March stretched into April. Easter came, and with it an awkward family dinner at Lisa’s. Sam was there, of course, son of a bitch couldn’t just stay away like he was supposed to. He stuck to one side of the room, hanging around with Mark and Matt and Mark’s family and of course Ben. Dean hung out on the other, making stilted but polite conversation with Adam and anyone who deigned to speak with him. He felt a little like the character from First Wives Club, the one who got ditched for the younger woman, and what the hell? He was the sexy surgeon, he had known all of these people forever.

He could see the appeal, though. Sam still looked tired, still looked thinner than he ought, but he grinned and laughed with the people he knew and those hazel eyes twinkled as he poured on every last bit of charm. He looked damn good in that suit of his, too.

Dean didn’t say a word to Sam the entire meal. Sam didn’t approach Dean either.

After Easter Dean expected more of the same, until April twentieth. That was when he got the phone call. Ellen came and pulled him out of surgery, which was bizarre. They never pulled a surgeon out of a procedure, not in the middle of things, and he felt a terrible pit growing in the center of his stomach. “Go scrub out, buddy, and head back to your office,” she ordered him. “I’ll take it from here.”

Dean didn’t make a fuss about it, just eased her into the procedure and went to clean up as quickly as possible. He didn’t know what was happening, but it couldn’t possibly be good. 

When he got to the office he found Benny waiting for him, accompanied by a blonde woman in the standard “FBI Black” suit. “Dr. Winchester?” she greeted amiably, her thick Minnesota accent a gash in the solemnity she and Benny were projecting. “There’s been an incident at the British International School –”

Dean grabbed her by the lapels. “Ben? Is it Ben?”

Benny pulled him off of her. “Dean, that’s not going to get any information for you, brother.”

“It’s okay, Dr. Lafitte. I know he’s emotional. I’d be rip-roaring ready to go too if it were my son. We don’t know much right now. But we do have a little bit of information thanks to Mr. Ben.”

The surgeon sagged with relief. “He’s alive. Oh thank God.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s not in a great deal of danger,” she cautioned. “Ben’s using his phone to broadcast a livestream, to his uncle, of one of the gunmen. We’re using that right now. I’ve been sent to bring you down to the staging area.” 

“Staging area?” Dean muttered. “I’d think you’d want to keep most parents as far away from that as possible.” 

“One of our agents assured us that you’d be able to handle whatever came your way, Doctor,” she assured him. Come on.” 

He let the agent, who introduced herself as Donna Hanscum, hustle him and Benny into a giant black SUV that pulled out of the emergency bay at a breakneck pace. He tried not to watch. If they let her drive she probably knew how to actually drive this thing, even on – “Did you just get this thing up onto two wheels?” he asked her.

“Mighta taken that curve a little sharp, but don’t you worry. We’ll have you to the scene in a lamb’s tail!” she promised brightly. 

Dean closed his eyes and wondered exactly what unit of time a lamb’s tail might be.

Whatever a lamb’s tail might equate to it wasn’t very long. He didn’t open his eyes or unwrap his fingers from the door handle until he hear the engine turn off, but he knew it hadn’t been much time. Certainly not long enough to have that feeling of dread dissipate.

The April chill wasn’t banished by the bright sunshine as Hanscum led Dean and Benny over to a giant trailer marked “Massachusetts State Police Mobile Incident Command.” It was surrounded by big black SUVs and Boston police cars and state trooper cars, with fire trucks and ambulance a safe distance away. The blonde steered the two civilians toward a knot of FBI agents clustered around a laptop, and Dean wasn’t surprised to realize that he knew almost all of them. He recognized Jody Mills’ close-cropped hair. He recognized Meg, although she’d exchanged her suit for something better to fight in: dark pants that looked like fatigues, a form-fitting shirt and a bulletproof vest that clearly identified her as FBI. Sam, of course, sat in front of the screen. 

Mills glanced at the men. “Dean. Sorry this is happening, but I have to say your son is one cool customer. As soon as the gunman broke into the room the kid started recording and sending the footage to Sam’s phone, so we knew that there was a problem right away. So far the gunman hasn’t noticed.”

“Why would he know to do that?” Dean gasped. “Isn’t he putting himself in danger that way?”

Sam didn’t look at him. He looked, even with whatever dumbass austerity measures he’d taken, like an absolute mountain of a man right now in his combat gear. “Shouldn’t be a problem. If the gunman even notices the phone, he won’t notice that the phone is on. I did a hack of one of those camera aps.”

Jody flicked his ear. “We’ve talked about unauthorized hacking, mister.”

Sam didn’t even react. “Didn’t need a warrant, it was his phone. And he asked me to. He saw something about a school shooting on TV and asked me about it. Anyway. We know that he’s got at least two accomplices, because he’s addressed two men. We’ve got a Tim and a Reggie in there as well as our guy.”

Dean grimaced. “Jesus. Is that a bomb?”

“We don’t know. Can’t tell yet,” Meg told him, all business. She didn’t even spare a moment to grope Benny. “What I can tell you is that the whole school is on lockdown. We haven’t heard from the terrorists –"

“How do you know they’re terrorists?” Benny challenged. 

“Because they’ve got an entire school held hostage on April 20th. That’s a very important day for the kind of people who like to make a big gory statement, and people who like to make a big gory statement are by definition terrorists.” Sam didn’t even look up, but pushed a button on his computer. “Hey, Ash, how’s it coming with the facial recognition on Johnny Come Lately here?”

A window opened up, to the right and a bit below the window that contained the footage Ben was transmitting. The face in the window looked like a roadie from a bad 1980s glam metal band. “I think I’ve got your man, Winchester. Meet Steve Niblock. He’s been vaguely ‘on the radar’ for ties to just about every white supremacist organization you can think of, but nothing worth getting too worked up about until about two weeks ago. Some of the people linked to him started getting their knickers in a twist about Muslim kids getting places at upscale boarding schools, and it looks like he’s the one who posted the article that started it all.” Ash’s face disappeared, to be replaced by an online article about the Saudi consul’s son going to a “prestigious, western private school” in the Boston area rather than to a religious institution.

Dean’s vision grayed out for a second. “Ben’s got a friend in class, Rashid. Sits right next to him. Says it’s because he’s new and he wanted him to feel welcome.” He could see it all unfolding. The asshole standing there with that giant gun, getting ready to unload it on these innocent children. Ben, because he’d inherited more than his fair share of the Winchester stubbornness, would turn around and try to defend him, because even as kids that was how Winchesters did things. Dean could still remember trying to thrust himself between angry rioters and a three-year-old Sammy back in Haiti, God forgive him but he never wanted to see that place again even if he could understand what people had been so angry about. He was going to lose his son, and all because some prick –

“We’re going to get him back, Dean,” Jody told him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “This is personal.” 

“How is this personal?” Dean cried, arms flailing. “You’ve never even met Ben! How is this personal for you?”

“Because he’s Sam’s nephew, dumbass,” Meg glowered, adjusting her vest. “You up for this, kid?”

“Who you calling kid, lady?” Sam teased back, rising to his feet in one fluid motion. Even under these circumstances, Dean couldn’t help but find it distracting. God, his little brother was hot. “You sure you can keep up in your old age?”

“Oh, just you wait and see. Gonna run circles around you, boy.”

“Gonna have to run, Meg.” He smirked, checking his weapons. “Your legs are too short to walk.” 

“Hey – hey!” Dean snapped. “School full of hostages here?”

“Relax, Dean,” Benny told him, a hand on his arm as Sam reached out and turned off his computer. “They’re psyching each other up, getting their competitive spirits all jazzed up and ready for the big game. You know?”

Dean did not know. “Why’d you turn off the screen?” he objected, hating the whining tone that his voice took. 

“Shut up, Dean.” They were the first words Sam had directed toward him in months. He turned to Jody. “We’ll keep you posted.” Then he and Meg turned toward the crowd of emergency personnel and disappeared.

“What the hell?” Dean complained. “Why did he turn off the computer? And is it really a good idea to send just two people in there? You have no idea what they’ve got, how many people they have, what could be going on in there. None.”

The supervisor sighed, face drawn. “That’s true. Of course, Meg and Sam have run through this exact same situation, or something very similar, a thousand times. If anyone can get in and get out with a minimum of casualties it’s them. If I send in the whole cavalry, the bad guys are going to blow the school sky-high. What they’re going to do is sneak in through a service entrance that’s more or less hidden. Unless the bad guys have a man on the inside, which would be pretty surprising all things considered, it would be unguarded and insecure. Then they’ll go in, secure the facility, incapacitate the perpetrators and free the hostages.”

“Just like that.” Dean snorted. “You make it sound so easy.”

“There’s usually some punching involved,” she admitted drily. “Sometimes more, sometimes less. Ben’s the light of Sam’s life, Dean. I’m expecting a lot of punching.” 

“But why did he turn the computer off?” he asked again, louder.

Benny sighed. “Because he didn’t want you to watch if things go south, brother.” 

Dean’s heart leaped up into his throat. As a medical doctor he knew that hearts were not supposed to do that, but it was the only explanation for the sensations moving up his esophagus. “What do you mean ‘if things go south?’” he screamed. 

People turned and stared. Jody and Benny exchanged glances. “Maybe we should get him to the church where we have the other parents,” she suggested.

“Oh hell no,” Dean cursed. “Hell no. That is my son in there, I am right here right now, and you’re not going to be trying to shunt me off to some holding pen for soccer moms while my boy’s in there waiting for some…some right wing jackass to start taking potshots!” He was gesticulating absurdly now, pointing at her, and Benny had to restrain him again.

“You need to find your chill, brother,” Benny hissed in his ear. “Or I will have the EMTs sedate you and then what good will you be?”

Dean brought himself up short. Benny meant it. “Sorry.”

“You’re distraught. I get it.” She softened. “I had a son once.” She straightened up. “Anyway. This is the best strategy for this situation, given that I have these resources available. No plan is foolproof. We’ve only heard him talking to two people but he could have five or six in there. They could have a dead man’s switch on one of the unseen perps. We just don’t know, and we can’t know. This is the least risky solution, but that doesn’t mean it’s not without risks. And while you and he may have your differences, he wasn’t going to have you sit there and have that be your memory.” 

“He’s done this before, sugar,” Benny reminded him. 

Jody stood up again, hand to her headset. “Sounds like they took out the principal.” 

“Dr. Chilton? She was so good with the kids!” He thought about the headmistress’ bright, blinding smile. “Oh God! Did any of the kids see?”

“No way to tell, but her body was left in the hallway. Sam’s telling me that she’s definitely gone, no way to save her. I’m sorry, Dean. I know you knew her.”

Dean felt numb. Intellectually he knew that it made sense; these guys were white supremacists and Dr. Chilton was a black, female authority figure. She’d almost certainly tried to stop them. “Sam? Meg?” the supervisor was requesting. “Is there time for you to wait for the bomb squad on those?”

Dean sank down to the ground, not caring how dirty he got. They were talking about bombs, plural. Bombs, in his son’s school. Someone had broken into Ben’s school and placed multiple bombs around the place and these were children, little kids and who did something like that? “How is this happening, Benny?” he whispered.

“There’s a lot of evil in the world, cher,” his friend told him, getting down on the ground beside him and putting an arm around his shoulder. “A whole lot of evil. And I don’t know why it seems to circle around your family like a vulture, but it does. Even still, y’all do rise above it. You’ll do it again.” 

“Agent Mills, I just ran into that Greek reporter girl from WFXT. Apparently one of the kidnappers called her?” Their day was improved further by the eternally cheerful Agent Hanscum, who sauntered up and put her hands in her back pocket. “You want me to send her on up?” 

“Fuck me twice," Jody barked out. “What? No, not you, Meg. You’re taken. The media showed up. Evidently your buddies inside got hold of….” Her eyes lit up. “You know what, Donna? Send her up. Just her, no cameras. Dean, can you hold it together and pretend to be official? I can’t let someone from the media know that you’re civilians. Benny, you’re easy enough to explain in case of a hostage negotiation. Dean, make something up.” 

The blonde agent rushed away again, Jody Mills turned her attention back to her headset, and Dean tried to figure out what was going on. She was going to let the media into their operation? No one did that. That was basically just handing the information right over to the enemy. “Okay, wait. How many bombs have you found so far?” She paused. “How many of them could it have taken to get that much ordinance in there? Geez, it couldn’t have been just three.” Another pause, while her dark eyes turned off to the side. “Okay. I guess two now. Is there anything left to question? No, Meg, the medical examiner does not constitute an interrogation specialist.” 

Dean and Benny exchanged glances. “What can I say?” the Cajun shrugged as he helped Dean to his feet. “I like a woman who doesn’t mess around with the important stuff.” 

The reporter was brought up. Dean recognized her, although he rarely watched television news anymore. She was pretty enough, and she seemed to recognize Jody. “Agent Mills!” she greeted, opening her arms wide for a hug. “It’s been all of what, four months since anything noisy involving your office has happened?”

Somehow Jody managed to affect a change from hardnosed agent to innocent angel in no time at all. “More like six,” she objected. “What was it, that courthouse shooting?”

“Oh yeah, good times!” The reporter gave an obnoxious-sounding giggle. “Is that pretty super-hero agent still working for you?”

“Oh, you know me, Maria. I’d never surrender an asset like that without a fight. So listen, you actually spoke to the gunmen.” She smiled widely, pleasantly.

“Yeah, yeah, I did. It’s interesting, though. I mean, you guys were up here awfully fast. It’s like you knew that there was a situation even before Boston police did.”

Jody laughed out loud. “What is this, the X-Files? Come on. Everyone’s got a cell phone now, Maria, even kids, and it’s possible that one of the students or one of the staff had a connection to someone in federal law enforcement. Regardless, we were informed very quickly.” 

They bantered back and forth easily for a little while, long enough for Dean to admire the talent of both women. Jody conveyed very little while giving Maria sound bites that would work well for her audience, and Maria passed along some vital information to Jody such as the fact that there were five gunmen, not three. 

As soon as Hanscum escorted Maria back outside the school gates Jody was back on her com. “Yeah, turns out there were five gunmen,” she warned. “Took out two more? Fabulous. Did you take them alive?” She paused. “Alright. Well, try to find out what he’s got in there with him and Meg? Try to rein him in if he gets out of hand.”

They waited in silence for five more minutes. Jody cringed and held her ear for a moment. She paused for a second and then waved to the state police team leader. “Alright. Bodies are in the hall and in the third year classroom. Sam and Meg are getting those kids out the windows; they’ve seen everything there is to see. They’re saying no injuries, so I’m going with that.” 

The statie wasn’t going to stand in Jody’s way. No one did, or at least not for long. “Yes, ma’am,” he agreed, and jumped to obey.

The words she’d uttered penetrated Dean’s brain. “No injuries,” he repeated. “Wait – no injuries? Ben’s okay?”

“So far so good,” she smiled at him. If there was a shadow across her eyes, no one mentioned it. 

And indeed, nineteen eight-year-olds were marching up the path toward the panoply of law enforcement vehicles, led by Meg. Ben alone did not march in the line. Instead he rode on his uncle’s hip, clinging to him like he hadn’t clung to anyone since he’d been about four or five. Dean didn’t grudge him the reversion; he must have been terrified in that classroom. 

When they arrived, Sam handed Ben off to his father. The boy wrapped himself around Dean and Dean squeezed him so tight he thought he might break him. He buried his face in his son’s hair and inhaled the scent, grateful that he was allowed to once again smell that froufy shampoo his mother insisted on buying him. “I am so proud of you today, Ben,” he told him. “You saved all of those kids. You recording, and sending that to your uncle Sam, got this dealt with so much faster and safer than it might have gone otherwise. You get that, right? You should be proud.” 

Ben nodded, soft hair against Dean’s cheek. Benny put a hand between them. “I thought Jody said there were no injuries,” he objected, face a thundercloud. “Medic! We need a medic!”

“Wait, What?” Dean looked down. 

Ben shook his head. “I’m not hurt, Daddy. I’m fine.”

“Then explain to me how in the hell all this blood got onto your daddy’s shirt then,” Benny asked. 

Dean turned his eyes to follow Benny’s hand, and saw that his shirt had indeed been stained red where Ben had wrapped himself around his waist. But if Ben was fine, maybe he’d picked up the blood on contact? “Sammy,” Dean whispered.

Ben, Dean and Benny cast their eyes around for Sam. “Sammy!” Dean called out, feeling panic rise up in him. 

Meg saw the look on his face, the blood on his shirt, and joined in the search. It took them a good five minutes to track him down, but Meg was just too good. Apparently he’d wandered off, found a tree to sit under, and closed his eyes. Dean dropped to his knees beside his brother, running his hands over his Kevlar-coated chest in search of the wound.

He found it in seconds. A suspect had stabbed him, right where the vest stopped. His beautiful face looked ashen now, but his pulse was still there underneath it all. “Sammy?” he called, trying to stop the bleeding with his tie. “Come on, Sammy. Stay with me. You’re going to be okay. Sammy!” 


	10. Take Me Back On Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the crisis.

Sam struggled toward consciousness and wondered why. He kept doing this. Falling down, passing out, getting patched up, struggling back toward consciousness. Lather, rinse, repeat. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to let him stay out? 

He knew where he was, of course. He was in a hospital. He kept winding up in hospitals. How much longer before the warranty expired and they just left him on the scrap heap where he belonged? Jesus Christ, he was no good to anyone. 

“I know you’re awake, Sammy. Saw your vitals change.” 

Dean. Why was Dean here? Dean hated him. 

He sounded awful, though. His voice rasped, even shook a little. He hadn’t slept. Why? Why was he here at all?

“I know you know this, because we both learned this before we learned to read. When someone’s been stabbed in the gut, they need to lie still and stop the bleeding. They do not need to go and beat seven kinds of crap out of a terrorist, they don’t need to go defuse bombs, and they don’t need to go carrying eight year olds who cling like limpets.” 

Sam opened his eyes, finally. Dean wasn’t going to stop talking and let him go back to sleep. Dean’s stubble had progressed to what could be described as a beard, and his eyes had gotten so red they might get mistaken for pinkeye. “There we go,” Dean told him, patting his hand. “You know, it was pretty touch and go there. I didn’t think we’d see those eyes of yours open again.”

Sam rolled his eyes. It wouldn’t have mattered. It wouldn’t have mattered if his eyes had stayed closed forever. 

“Hey, none of that,” Dean chided. “That boy of mine is pretty sure that you’re the Second Coming. I think it’s the hair, myself, but either way he’d be wrecked if we lost you. So would I. And Meg. And Lisa, and Matt, and Mark, and Mark’s kids. And Jody.” 

Sam looked away. Maybe they’d feel bad for a minute, but they’d figure out very quickly that it was better this way. He wasn’t anything; he was just a failure –

A warm, calloused hand slipped into his. “Sammy….” His brother trailed off. “It’s funny. I want to say ‘I’m sorry,’ but it seems almost stupid, you know? Because ‘sorry’ isn’t…it’s not deep enough. It doesn’t cover enough. It doesn’t cover literally twenty years of things that I should’ve known and things we never talked about but should have. I feel like the entire past thirteen years have been wasted because of shitty communication.” He paused, considered. “I mean, maybe not wasted. We have Ben.”

Sam huffed. He loved Ben, but Ben wasn’t his. 

“I have fucked up, Sammy. And it hurt you. I get…I mean I can’t say that I ‘get’ why you left now, because I still don’t understand what was happening. Right under my nose. But…I accept it. I love you, Sammy. I never wanted to hurt you. I still don’t. I know I’m not the only one who has. I know you’ve been through a lot, more than most, and I’m just part of it. But I always wanted to be the one to shield you from hurt, not cause it.”

Sam couldn’t help the tears that sprang to his eyes any more than he could stop them from leaking out. Dean cried out softly, whether in distress or shock, and he moved quickly. He sat down beside Sam and took the patient into his muscular arms, pillowing Sam’s head on his chest. “It’s okay, Sammy. It’s going to be okay.” Those hands, those surgeon’s hands, stroked his hair and patted his back until Sam was able to control his response a bit better. 

Still, Dean held him and Sam let himself be held. It felt good. It felt right. It shouldn’t feel right, but it did. “Take me back,” Dean whispered into his ear.

Sam hesitated for just a second before whispering, “Yes.” 


End file.
